The Mother Lode
Tricksy Twins
Seekers after tricksy twins will, sooner or later, run into the mother lode of problem-posing pairs, the family of couplets in which one member ends in ‘-ic’ and the other in ‘-ical’.
Sue Vide said that it would be less than politic to share her political opinions.
Mary Alice Aforethought preferred classical music to classic rock.
The founding of an institute for historical studies struck Ed Memoire as a historic moment.
In a few cases, the difference that separates the members of the set boils down to parts of speech. ‘Logic’, ‘rhetoric’, and ‘cleric’, for example, always serve as nouns, while ‘logical’, ‘rhetorical’, and ‘clerical’ invariably play the role of adjectives.
Trained in logic and rhetoric, the careful cleric made few logical, rhetorical, or, for that matter, clerical errors.
Alas (and, indeed, alack), few pairs follow this paradigm. Likewise, the rule that relegates ‘-ical’ words to days of yore applies to prophetical, juridical, and didactical, but not to empirical, mathematical, or lyrical.
Likewise, the notion that words that end in ‘-ical’ tend to be more academic than their shorter counterparts works well for electrical engineers and astronomical observatories, but not economic advisors (even when the later prove economical with the truth.)
Finally, even when pairs of this sort travel in herds, the patterns rarely hold for long.
