Doing some re-reading recently of favorite books turned into ebooks, and got into a session of trying to avoid my word-processor's red-lighting words so often by adding as many conjugations and compounds of each term it had trouble with as I could think up. In the middle of working with terms like monger/mongery/mongering, minstrel/minstrelsy, I found myself stymied when I tried to do similar terms for "wright".
I mean, we know that wainwrights built wagons, shipwrights built ships, wheelwrights specialized in making wheels, etc. But what do you call the business they work at, their art? X-wrighting, X-wrightery? Have wagon-makers ever wainwrought, or might one describe their products as wain-wrought? Or should one default to the present tense of wright/wrought, to say these people WORK, or are employed at a WORKS, doing X-WORK or X-WORKING?
Anyone with a clue? I'm guessing the "works" variants, since I've seen words like those. But I've found nary a mention in anything official, printed or web-based.
Since it's an "archaic" word, I'd assume we've moved on to other ways of describing the jobs. We don't have "steetwrights" but we do have "steelworkers." So "wright" may have been subsumed into "worker" as an acceptable ending today.
I find KB's observation to be very interesting. As you said, Proof, it may be too old a term for us to find contemporary terms for the act of wheel building/shipbuilding, etc. (Note: I had to separate "wheel" from "building" just now, but the computer liked "shipbuilding." Go figure...)
It reminds me of my recent discovery that "mechanic" meant any grunt worker in times past, not just one who dealt with machines. This adds fuel to my assertions in times past that we cannot positively know that we know what we're talking about, thus can't relay meaning to another person whose verbal associations cannot equal our own.
Thanks for the re-welcome, Kalleh. While I am wont to go hermit for extended periods, this latest absence was rather forced upon me by unhappy circumstance. As it is, I'm not likely to be back very often.
And I'm aware of wright/wrought being archaic modes for "work". The suffix "-urge" for a creative type is archaic as well, but that doesn't mean both don't still linger in the occasional remnant, such as playwright and dramaturge. Besides, just because a word has gone archaic doesn't mean a word-lover wouldn't still find it of interest!
I did find it interesting to note that some of my hardcopy dictionaries listed endings for "blacksmith" and other compound forms that it didn't for plain "smith". Forget at the moment which was which, but among the endings were: -ery (art and place) and -ings (individual works).This message has been edited. Last edited by: KB,
