We've just added 69 new tones and 33 new speech verbs, listed below. You can see the most recently added tones with TONE LIST NEW. Have fun!

New tones: abashed, ardent, audacious, baffled, baffling, befuddled, bewildered, bewildering, bleak, brief, cheeky, clinical, coaxing, contentious, dejected, deliberate, diffident, dire, disconcerted, disconsolate, disoriented, droll, ecstatic, feeble, forlorn, fussy, guarded, helpless, honest, hostile, hurried, inconsolable, insipid, ironic, jovial, lazy, measured, modest, nagging, nasty, nonplussed, optimistic, patronizing, pensive, perplexed, persuasive, philosophical, placid, puzzled, reflective, rejoicing, reproving, resolute, satirical, severe, short, snotty, sober, speechless, steady, strained, tight, toneless, unexpected, ungracious, voracious, warning, withering, and witty.

New verbs: allow, aver, bawl, beseech, blubber, cheer, claim, cluck, coax, critique, demur, disclose, droll, fret, fuss, glower, gripe, maintain, nag, object, orate, posit, pontificate, profess, pronounce, rave, rebut, rejoice, rehearse, reveal, whisper aloud, yammer, and yelp.

~Vanah

Awesome!! Seconding Riend's reply!

*begins updating Tones by Tone*

(http://www.houseaspis.com/resources/tonesbytone)

/seo, wheels and skulls department/

Regarding Aspis' spreadsheet, some of my ad hoc categorizations are getting pretty bloated. Taking suggestions on new columns to add to Tones by Tone to spread out the tones a little-- particularly the "Manner" columns, which are kind of my "this doesn't go in any of the other columns" columns.

/seo, wheels and skulls department/

Excellent!

Doug

Wow, hurriedly raving?! I don't know a player nor a character than can make lots of use of this one!!

---

Check out who's dying any time! https://twitter.com/GSIVDeathLog

>Daid: Pretty sure you have a whole big bucket as your penny jar. You never have only two cents. :p

Broke? Or Broken? Or Broked? Or Borked?

You know. . .

Doug

I've always thought there should be an un-negated form of nonplussed. If we can re-invent kempt as a back-formation from unkempt, why not? Then we can correct people for mis-using the word's inverse.

- Dude. I was totally plussed by those HSN releases yesterday.

- Wordn00b. You mean you were nonplussed.

- Whut?

Dave, Brandain's Bard

There's a whole raft of words that exist only as negative forms. Most of them, when you think about it, are what you want your employees to be:

(actual) negation	(non-)word	why
in-	ept	so that you have, you know, capable employees
un-	kempt	so they present a good appearance
dis-	gruntled	always talk with a smile

Sadly, I can't really recall the rest of my list offhand, but those are the main three. :)

Word formation! One of my favourite topics. Warning: nerd-out incoming. Skip this post if you're easily bored, or have a social life.

Apt/adept/inept is actually really interesting. They do indeed all have the same root ... But they also don't. (And they also do, but I'll explain that at the end.)

Latin aptus produces all three words; the change of vowel from -a- to -e- is a normal function of adding a prefix, just like rapt and surreptitious are built on the same root. However, apt and adept / inept are not strictly speaking built on the same root. That's because aptus is the perfect participle of two different verbs (apio, meaning to join or fasten, and apiscor, meaning to attain or reach). "Having been fastened to" something produced an adjective that meant being suited to that thing, while "having attained" something produced an adjective meaning to have obtained skill at that thing. Then English resolved the ambiguity of aptus by borrowing apt for the first meaning, but using the prefixed form adept for the second meaning.

So those words superficially have the same origin, aptus, but that origin is actually derived from two completely separate sources, apio and apiscor_/_adipiscor. Cool, huh? And to confuse matters more, both of those distinct sources emerged separately out of the same source, the Indo-European root *AP-, which carries the basic meaning of grasping something. So they're the same, and different, and the same. I love languages.

Now, before I over-stay my welcome...

Kempt, as previously discussed here, is a weird one. It is a real word; in fact, it's older than its negation. It just fell out of use for, uh, most of the modern history of the English language, before being re-invented in the 20th Century as a back-formation of its own negation; basically performing necromancy on a word that had been dead for something like five centuries. The root is an Old English verb which means 'to comb'. A kempt person is 'having been combed', and therefore neat and tidy.

Disgruntled, weirdly, is not actually a negation. The prefix is a rare example of dis- being used emphatically rather than negatively. Gruntle was a medieval frequentative form of grunt; frequently grunting meant to mutter and complain. So, if the prefix was negative, disgruntled would actually mean someone who didn't complain at all. Adding the emphatic prefix produced a verb that meant to thoroughly grouch and complain, and disgruntled is its past participle, therefore a person who has really complained a lot. Using gruntled to mean pleased is therefore actually a malformation based on mis-reading the origins of the word it was built on; because the prefix is emphatic, a gruntled person is actually just someone who is a little bit less gruntled than the disgruntled person was.

And with that, I return you to your regularly scheduled...

Uh, what was this forum for again?

Dave, Brandain's Wordsmith

>>AP- prefix. So, this is what you use on the gripping hand?

Izzn't AP tests what smart yungins do afore they leave school? So the can prove they is good at schoolin?

Clunk

(Buy your swords at CBD weapons in Zul Logoth.)