Henri
January 4, 2005
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• nonplus •
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Pronunciation: nahn-plês • Hear it!
Part of Speech: Verb, transitive
Meaning: To bewilder, perplex, to take aback, to put at a complete loss for words. (Indeed!)
Notes: You might think that anything nonplus would be minus but language is not mathematics, thank heavens. To nonplus someone is to bring up nothing positive or negative in their mind, but a perfect zero. If you like to double your consonants when adding suffixes, you will enjoy this Good Word: nonplusses, nonplussed, nonplussing. However, it you think this habit wasteful of S's, don’t do it: nonpluses, nonplused, nonplused [nonplusing - [sub]MHD[/sub]]. Both spellings are currently acceptable.
In Play: Certainly we have all had that moment when we are so completely taken aback by a comment or situation, that nothing comes to our mind: "When the guy at the fair guessed my weight, I was completely nonplussed—I thought I looked thinner in my new outfit!" When this happens, you have been nonplussed: "When, after 25 years of culinary servitude, Phyllis Glass told her hubby to cook his own supper, he was totally nonplussed."
Word History: This word originated as something like *pel-/plê 6,000 years ago in what linguists presume was a language they call "Proto-Indo-European" (PIE), since most of the languages of India and Europe come from it. Words change a lot over so much time and the sound [p] consistently changed to [f] in getting to English. So what comes up in Latin as plus, came to English as full. The Latin word for "full", plenus, comes from the same source. The noun for this adjective, plenitas "fullness", became plente in Old French and, while it was there, English borrowed it as plenty. By the way, there was a variant of the PIE root, *pol, which ended up as English folk, though we can only speculate why. For more on how languages develop from languages, help yourself to How is a Hippo like a Feather from our reference shelf.
