Today’s word (“Nocuous” meaning: ‘Noxious, hurtful; venomous, poisonous’,(OED)) prompted the start of a list: Words with a suffix that are in common usage, and yet without the suffix are less frequently used. A quick google on ‘nocuous’ returns 110,000 uses compared with more than 9m for ‘innocuous’; ‘scathed’ has 445,000 hits, whereas ‘unscathed’ has 18m and whilst ‘pervious’ does yield more than 7.5m hits, ‘impervious’ returns almost 41m. Also interesting that there at least three suffixes (in-, un- and im-) that have the same negating effect, but this is a topic for another day. Anyway, back to the matter in hand – I found this abandoned stuff underneath the railway bridge and thought if not actually nocuous, it was pretty close as you wouldn’t really want to eat any of it: a substance, some of those plants look dodgy and the area is renowned for adders, which are probably lurking somewhere in the undergrowth.
Day #122 of a 365 project, where the daily pic is informed by the OED word of the day.