• To Be- Or Not To Be-?

At the New Year, a member of the family tried to get a word past the rest of us in Scrabble.  His logic for ‘bedot’ was inescapable (he said that it’s what you do when you put dots all over something, like a wall).  But we said that it didn’t exist.  And it doesn’t.  The Shorter OED does have ‘bedote’, though that means something else.  Then yesterday I tweeted an updated definition of a related word, which does exist:

• to bespot  to do Damien Hirst’s work for him

My computer keeps trying to change ‘bespot’ to ‘besot’ … to make sottish, dull or stupid.  No comment.

All this got me thinking about ‘be-‘ words and as a result I’ve just spent a bewitching half an hour over an early lunch, scouring my Chambers dictionary.  I found some 200 ‘be-‘ words, around 1/3 of which are more or less in current usage, such as: becalmed, befall, befit, begin, behave, behead, belabour, beleaguered, belong, bemuse, bequeath, beseech, besmirch, bespoke, betide, between, betwixt.

The ‘be-‘ varies quite a bit in significance, sometimes reinforcing the meaning of the stem word, sometimes contradicting it (‘behead’).  Sometimes the stem word itself has no separate currency:  ‘queath’ no longer exists, but apparently it came from the same stem as ‘quoth’.  By return, though, ‘bequoth’ doesn’t exist either, although I rather like the sound of it.  Ah, language!

The greatest fun was coming across words new to me.  Here are ten of my favourites, which I might just try to use:

• beblubbered  disfigured by weeping
• to beduck  to plunge under water
• to bedung  to befoul with manure
• to begunk  to trick, befool, jape
• to bekiss  to cover with kisses
• to bemad  to madden
• to beprose  to discuss in prose and tediously
• to besing  to celebrate in song
• to bespeed  to help on
• to bethwack  to thrash soundly

How about promoting some new ‘be-‘ words?  I think I ought to start with ‘bedot’.  Any other suggestions?