• aftermath •
Printable Version Pronunciation: æf-têr-mæth • Hear it!
Part of Speech: Noun
Meaning: 1. A result or consequence of an event, the wake, what follows, as the aftermath of a war. 2. A second mowing of the same crop in the same season, as an aftermath of grass.
Notes: Today's word is wholly unrelated to our recent Good Word, polymath, even though, like polymath, it has nothing to do with mathematics, either. It is essentially a lexical orphan, with only a rarely used plural, aftermaths.
In Play: This word is most often used to refer to the unfortunate results of an event, an implication we should not overlook when we place this word in play: "Legend would have our Doubtful Thomas to be the aftermath of an evening of reviled but unrivaled revelry before the revelation of the pill."
Word History: Today's Good Word is a compound noun made up of after "later" + math "mowing". This math comes from the same Germanic root as German Mahd "mowing, a swath" and Matte "meadow", on the one hand, and English mead and meadow, on the other. We can see the aftermath of different suffixes on it: the [th], [d] and [w] in math, mead, and mow, another relative. The original Proto-Indo-European root was *me-/*mo "cut with a sickle". Outside English we see more of its aftermath in Latin metere "to reap" and Middle Cornish midil "reaper".
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