The Lost Positive

I know a little man both ept and ert. And intro? extra? No, he's just a vert. Sheveled and couth and kempt, pecunious, ane; His image trudes upon the ceptive brain.

Rhymester David McCord is fascinated by what happened to the positive form of such common words as inept, inert, disheveled, uncouth and unkempt. For years, McCord, who is secretary of the Alumni Fund of Harvard University and a well-known writer of light verse, has waged a happy campaign for the restoration of what he calls the Lost Positive. For amusement he writes sprightly rhymes full of positives, like the one above (which he calls Gloss) published in the January Harper's Magazine.

Last week it looked as if McCord's campaign was getting somewhere. New York Herald Tribune Columnist John Crosby had "dorsed" the trend, proclaimed himself a member of the "Society for the Restoration of Lost Positives." Later, a smart copywriter for Gimbels picked up the idea, blazoned an eight-column ad for fall college fashions: "couth, kempt, sheveled . . . that's how college girls will look this fall."

But McCord was already ahead of them. Cloistered in his Harvard office, he was busy turning out more Lost Positives: licit, iterate, fulgent, prentice, placable, delible, souciant, effable, vertently, fangled, sponsible, pression, fatigable. McCord says he prefers real Lost Positives, but for fun sometimes uses false ones, such as pistle. "The prefix in that word is really not the Latin e but the Greek epi," he explains. This justified his reply to a friend who sent him a clipping with a note: "Lighted to ward the closed which is cised from day's Irish Times." McCord wrote back: "Pistle ceived and tents gladly noted."

McCord even got around to another Lost Positive verse which begins:

Some day, full of ertia, I'll be taking off for Persia.

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