taste me, as the food and drink Alice found almost said. she was cast unto a stormshorn sunderedsea. you too will fall beneath my waves in time.


profile pic by moiwool (nonbinary color edit by me)


lookatthesky
@lookatthesky

the daily vibe is jesters and clown girls i think (and im aware im a few months late)


lookatthesky
@lookatthesky

actually, -er as male/genderneutral noun and -er as agent already get conflated sometimes, what if we take that to its logical conclusion?

follower->followess, traveler->traveless/travelless (this one's weird), keeper -> keeperess/keepress, maker -> mak(e)ress, gamer -> gam(e)ress/gamess (??), etc (and gender -> gendress is also cool tho it doesn't quite work the same). I also use terms like "ADHDer" and "ctpsder" so I guess I could call myself an adhdess if I wanted but that's mega cursed lmao

going the other way, are there words ending in -ess that can reasonably be backderived into new interesting words?

if we imagine "hollowness" as "a fem person who hollows", we can get "hollowner"; some other weird ones like this exist like bloodless -> bloodler, harmless -> harmler. they're kinda a stretch and some will be too close to existing words to be useful (e.g. sharpness -> sharpner is very close to sharpener?) but I think you could do something with them. (interestingly the words lightner and darkner from deltarune follow a similar pattern)

conclusion: i should not be allowed to make new words


lookatthesky
@lookatthesky

ok this one is by far the easiest and most versatile, I'm finding

first off, the obvious ones. vampiress, ogress. some others that described beings already are squiress, umpiress, vulturess

now there are a bunch of words ending in -re that aren't usually agentive but can be made into very evocative agentives!

lyress, pyress, noospheress, fissuress, bizarress, folkloress, sapphiress, etc etc. I suppose you can also have lyrer, pyrer, etc, but some of these are somewhat awkward due to having two /ɹ/ syllables in a row, at least in my dialect (general american); though "pleasurer" is already a term in consensus English, I believe.

sadly, I don't know of any resources with which I can search words via pronunciation rather than spelling, so I have to look up every ending which might have this syllabic-r consonant at the end of them. because I thought of "sorceror", -or is next—

based on terms like "reflector" and "semiconductor", it seems like this suffix is mostly used for inanimate objects that do something, which I'll tentatively call the inanimate agentive and look it up later. I won't go into further details on these, but it seems like they would be most useful if you want to arbitrarily gender inanimate objects in your work for whatever reason. I routinely use neopronouns to describe objects, so why not. oh, we also have stuff like neighbress and animatress and narratress in here, decent amount of animate agentive too... though not too much very interesting? warrior into warriress is silly and kind of awkward, vapor -> vapress is excessively silly and wonderful, petrichress could also be silly. (edit: I've been informed -tor becomes -trix in the feminine, e.g. aviator to aviatrix. so if you want, narratrix and animatrix are viable alternatives. annihilatrix, navigatrix, manipulatrix— can't believe I almost missed this one.)

anyway, one last thing. I was wondering about backderiving sorceror/sorcerer (both consensus spellings) to get a verb, meaning to, well, practice sorcery (hmm, petrichry, narratry... on -try ending, chemistress... a kind of mistress?... anyway,,,). "sorcer" is the obvious choice but sometimes these take a bit of work; I tried doing similar for luminescent, and at first got lume, but ultimately settled with lum; and with turbulence, I went from turbulate to turble. my friend, here, derived incandescence into candesce. the ultimate etymology is latin sors, meaning "fate, lot"; so maybe "sorce" or "sorse"? "sorre"? I'm open to ideas.


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