longage and coolth

Antonyms are often (if not usually) uneven. Long and short describe different directions in the same dimension, but we can only (unless we're being a little silly) measure things in length: two feet long, not two feet short. Even if two feet is short, the thing has a length, not a shorth. Because of the way measurement works, it's generally the word that describes the upward direction on the scale that is more 'unmarked', which is to say it can be used in more contexts, like measurements. 

One word that I like a lot, because it seems to go against this trend, is coolth. This is convenient for the particular treatment of gradable adjective meaning that was central to my doctoral work—coolth works better than shorth (semantically speaking) because measurement of temperature and measurement of length work a bit differently. Things can usually get colder (yes, there's an absolute zero, but you'll be dead before you experience it), but once they get too short, they cease to exist.

The word coolth has been around since at least the 1540s, but it probably gets re-invented nearly every time it's used, since no one's hearing it much. It's easy enough to see how to make it. Warmth has given us the recipe.

But anyway, I thought of my love for coolth when I read James Harbeck's blog post about the word longage. It's the opposite of shortage. It doesn't seem to have quite the history that coolth has, but then shortage has only been around since the late 19th century. (Thank you, American English.) And I thought: good for you, short. You got to be the word that did something morphologically interesting and then your opposite copied you. You got to have the kind of 'getting out and about' fun that the unmarked adjective usually gets to have. 

Anyhow, have a read of James's blog post about longage.

And now I find out he's got one about coolth too!