Today I'm thinking about the word "ulterior". It is an example of what I like to call a monogamous adjective. There is only one noun it ever consorts with. One never hears about ulterior meanings, ulterior virtues, ulterior dreams, or even ulterior designs. It's only ulterior motives.

I feel like I ought to be able to offer other examples, but, although I can think of other non-adjective words that are limited to specific phrases, no other monogamous adjective come promptly to mind. Anyone?

Ulterior's lack of versatility threatens to atrophy its meaning. I daresay that most people who speak of ulterior motives aren't really clear on what makes them ulterior. It's not uncommon to hear about "obvious ulterior motives" or "blatant ulterior motives". If they're obvious, are they really ulterior? I don't think so.

The Latin suffix -ior makes the comparative form for adjectives. So while fortis is strong, fortior is stronger; while rubicund is red, rubicundior is redder. (Hence "rosa rubicundior, lilio candidior", "redder than the rose, whiter than the lily", which I know from Carmina burana, but an abundance of Google hits suggests is in some other popular song as well.)

Latin adjectives, like most Latin words, can take on various endings. I'm inexpert in Latin and I couldn't tell you the difference between fors, forte, and fortis, nor would I know what to include and what to truncate before sticking the -ior on the end. I just generally figure if a word ends in -ior and something on the front resembles a known adjective, it's probably a comparative form. (But this assumption leads me astray in the continuation of the Carmina lyric, "omnibus formosior, semper in te glorior", where, as I learned only just tonight, glorior is actually a verb: "more beautiful than everything, always in thee I glory.")

There are several short Latin words whose meaning describe a locational relationship, and which might be adjectives, adverbs or prepositions depending on form, which can end in either -ra or -er. Supra, infra, extra, and intra mean above, below, outside, and inside. These words find their way to modern English if not as words at least as prefixes. So too do their comparative forms — superior, inferior, exterior, and interior: higher, lower, outer, and inner.

Ultra is similar to extra. Both might be translated as "beyond", but extra suggests being outside the confines of some boundary while ultra suggests being on the other side of something. Those who are ultramontane are on the other side of the mountains, and an ultramontanist was someone who believed that Papal authority ought extend to beyond-the-mountains people like French or Germans. When the medieval Venetians referred to their holdings in the Near East as the "Oltramare", they were simply acknowledging the location of those lands: beyond the sea. The French Outremer and English ultramarine are cognates. (The former should be mentally parsed as "outre-mer", not the tempting "out-remer".)

If you knew that ultramarine is a shade of blue, you might have assumed it has something to do with the color of the sea. If so, you'd have been wrong. Ultramarine is the color of lapis lazuli, a deep rich blue hue that the sea rarely approximates. The blue silicate can be extracted from the lapis lazuli stone and used as a pigment, called "ultramarine". It is so named because the stone comes to Europe from the Middle East, by way of the ultramarine trading colonies. (Another colorful rock, the turquoise, is similarly named, the word being the French feminine adjective meaning "Turkish". At that time, Europeans would indiscriminately apply the label "Turkish" to anywhere in the Muslim world, not just the region of the country we now know as Turkey. The turquoise stones almost certainly came from Persia.)

If something is the ne plus ultra, it is the best of its kind because there is "no more beyond".

In modern English, the prefix ultra- doesn't stray too far from the Latin meaning. If you are an ultra-liberal, you're so far beyond liberal that you're on the other side of garden-variety liberal. Likewise if you're an ultra-conservative, you're beyond ordinary conservatives.

Superior, inferior, senior, and junior retain a strong sense of the comparative, but they don't require explicit statement of any comparand. A person might simply be junior, or a being might simply be superior, without any specification of exactly what they are junior or superior to. Ulterior, in its most literal sense, is "more beyond", or more distant, remoter, further. My Merriam-Webster says "going beyond what is openly said or shows and esp. what is proper". That final "especially", I think, acknowledges recent evolution of the meaning. When people speak of ulterior motives today, I doubt they have any sense of them being beyond that which is openly acknowledged; I think the primary sense is just that the motives are naughty.

I would consider that an example of Bernstein's second law: a bad meaning driving out a good. I wouldn't say that ulterior in its earlier sense is any treasure, but it has more value than the vague and muddled newer sense.

10:23:30 PM  [permalink]  comment []