Rescind

[Dr. Goodword]

• rescind •

Pronunciation: ri-sind • Hear it!

Part of Speech: Verb

Meaning: Revoke, cancel, annul, repeal.

Notes: The trick in spelling this word is to remember that the [s] sound is spelled SC. This verb comes with an active derivational family: the action noun is rescission and the personal noun is rescinder. We have several adjectives to choose from: rescissory, rescindable, and, of course, rescinding.

In Play: We can only rescind things that have the nature of a law: The city council tonight decided to rescind the 18th century law against kissing while in a buggy." This applies to all sorts of decisions of that nature: "The company quickly rescinded the chemical alert it had issued when Throckmorton spilled the concoction he was drinking at work."

Word History: This word was borrowed from French rescinder "cancel; cut off", inherited normally from Latin rescindere "cut off, cancel, abolish", from re-, simply an intensifier here + scindere "to cut, tear, rend; split, divide, separate". Latin inherited its word from Proto-Indo-European skind- "cut", an extension of the root (s)kei- "to cut, split". We find this word again underlying scissors, derived from the past participle of scindere. In Greek the PIE root turns up in skhizein "to split", the noun from which is skhisma that English schism is based on. We also get schizoid and schizophrenia from derivatives of the same Greek verb. (Today's Good Word some to us from the fertile vocabulary of Joakim Larsson, our long-time friend in Sweden.)

[George Kovac]

Dr. Goodword wrote:

from re-, simply an intensifier here

Well, the prefix re- isn’t usually assigned that task. Dictionary.com explains its role thusly:

re- a prefix, occurring originally in loanwords from Latin, used with the meaning “again” or “again and again” to indicate repetition, or with the meaning “back” or “backward” to indicate withdrawal or backward motion:
regenerate; refurbish; retype; retrace; revert.

We have seen on these pages other examples of re- used solely as an intensifier: fulgent/refulgent; splendent/resplendent. I will not here repeat the pun I used to complain about those word pairs, which come in redundant fixed and prefixed versions, because rescind is not yoked to an unintensified version.

But this is language as we actually speak: idiosyncratic, inconsistent and rarely sedulous in the application of linguistic principles. When it comes to English grammar, Britannia waives the rules.

[Dr. Goodword]

Come to think of it, "again" would intensify the meaning of a verb, wouldn't it? I have argued that a drinkable wine and a playable piano mean "very drinkable wine" and "very playable piano" because "drink" is part of the definition of wine, thus is repeated in the meaning of the phrase. Just like a red, red rose means "a very red rose". Another way of repeating the sense of a word is to add the meaning of "again". I was thinking of re- in the sense of "back, reverse" when I wrote up this word. I think we are both correct on this.

[George Kovac]

Re: recurrences and intensity

On reconsideration, thank you, Dr. Goodword, for regaling us with that revealing recitation of the recondite relationships revolving around the uses of re-.

Regards,

George