COULD you please explain the meaning of the suffixes -less, -ful and -free and how to correctly use them? Why do priceless and useless have opposite connotations, one positive and the other negative? If an article contains no error, should we say it is error-free or errorless? If an artist possesses no talent, is he talent-free or talentless? If some words have their opposite counterparts (i.e. careless vs. careful, useless vs. useful, helpless vs. helpful), can there be such words as beautiless (opposite of beautiful) and paperful (opposite of paperless)? – Nasir

The suffix “-less” can be added to nouns or verbs to form mainly adjectives. When added to nouns, it can mean “without”, or “not having”, as in “shameless” (without shame), “homeless” (not having a home to live in), “worthless” (without any worth), “valueless” (lacking material or moral value), “useless” (without any use or serving no purpose).

When added to verbs, it can mean “cannot be –ed” (the dash standing for the verb) as in “countless” (too many to be counted). The word “price” can be a noun or a verb, but it is treated as a verb when the suffix “-less” is added to it. The word “priceless” means “so valuable that it cannot be priced”.

The word “priceless” has a positive meaning, while “useless” has a negative one because the suffix “-less” has more than one meaning. The word “countless” however, is neither positive nor negative – it just describes a very large number of things.

Regarding your question about “error-free” and “errorless”, the word “error-free” is more commonly used and would be used to describe an article. It is commonly used in connection with exam marking and performance, e.g. in the following statement on Grammatical Range and Accuracy: “produces frequent error-free sentences” [from the online document IELTS Writing Band Descriptors: Task 1 (Public Version), produced at Aberystwyth University]

“Errorless” also exists as a word, as does “errorful”, but these tend to be used in scholarly books and articles, e.g. in the title and abstract of the article “Do errors matter? Errorless and errorful learning in anomic picture naming” in the journal Neuropsychological Rehabilitation, whose abstract appears on a website of University College, London.

All three words: error-free, errorless and errorful are recorded in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), but I couldn’t find them in any of the Advanced Learner’s dictionaries that I consulted. Errorless, however, can be found in the Concise Oxford English Dictionary (COD) (2004, revised 2009).

The suffix “-ful” has several meanings. According to the COD, when it is added to a noun to form an adjective, it can mean “full of” or “having the qualities of”, as in “careful” and “beautiful”. When added to an adjective to form another adjective, the sense of the original adjective doesn’t change much, as in “wrongful”. When added to a verb to form an adjective, it means “apt to, able to; accustomed to”, as in “forgetful” or “mournful”. It can also be added to a noun to form another noun “denoting the amount needed to fill the specified container”, e.g. “spoonful”, “roomful”.

The ending “–free” is not called a suffix, but a “combining form”, meaning “a form of a word normally used in compounds in combination with another element to form a word (e.g. bio- “life” in biology)” (COD). The ending “-free” just means “free of or from”. It is not a new ending to words, as may be suggested by the current craze of using “sugar-free”, “fat-free” etc food of all kinds. Shakespeare in the 16th century used “fancy-free” to mean “not in love” or “free from feeling romantic love for anyone”, and the word is still used today in the phrase “footloose and fancy-free” (= free to do anything and go anywhere because not restrained by romantic love for someone).

To go back to another of your questions “If an artist possesses no talent, is he talent-free or talentless?”, the answer is he is untalented. This is the word commonly used now for those without talent, and its opposite is talented. The word “talentless” does exist in the OED, but its last recorded use was in 1898. And, strange though it may seem, beautiless also exists in the OED, but its last recorded use was in 1835. Paperful exists as well in the OED, but not as the opposite of paperless. It is defined as “as much as fills a paper”, but the last recorded use of this word was in 1722.

As you can see from above, there are no hard and fast rules about which nouns, verbs or adjectives can take the suffixes “-less” and “-ful” and the combining form “-free”. There are only a few guidelines. When we write and are in doubt, we will have to check in a dictionary for the current usage of our chosen words with those endings. Getting a feel for the language through reading a lot of good books would also certainly help.

Meaning of ‘whip’

I cannot find the meaning of “whip” with the following usage in Michael Swan’s Practical English Usage. The example is from a newpaper headline: “Typhoon whips Philippines”

Does whips here mean arrive quickly? – Lydia

A whip is “a long thin piece of rope or leather, attached to a handle, used for making animals move or punishing people.” (http://www.oxfordadvancedlearnersdictionary.com/dictionary/whip)

To whip someone or something is to hit them hard with a whip. When we say that a typhoon “whips” a place, it means that the typhoon hits it very hard, with strong winds and a lot of rain. “Whips” there is used as a metaphor.

Addressing surgeons

How does one address a surgeon who is a Datuk? A doctor is addressed as Dr but a surgeon is addressed as Mr, so do we call the latter who is a Datuk, Datuk Mr Jagdeesh Singh, for example? – Hussaini Abdul Karim

The British tradition of addressing male surgeons as “Mr” does not seem to be practised in Malaysia nowadays, although there are people who remember a time before Merdeka when it was practised.

I looked at the list of Fellows of the Academy of Medicine of Malaysia, and I noticed that under the sub-heading “College of Surgeons”, the surgeons who have Datukships have the titles “Datuk Dr” or “Dato’ Dr” after their names. Nowhere did I see a “Datuk Mr” listed.

It looks like we now write or say “Datuk Dr” before the name of a male surgeon who is a Datuk, so it would be Datuk Dr Jagdeesh Singh. Interestingly, in Britain, where surgeons are addressed as “Mr”, a knighted surgeon is addressed only as “Sir” (no “Mr”), like Sir Bernard Ribiero, past president, Royal College of Surgeons of England. A knighted doctor who is not a surgeon, however, is addressed as “Dr Sir” as is the case with Dr Sir Peter Simpson, an anaesthetist.

If you are interested in the origin of the British practice of addressing a surgeon as “Mr”, there is an interesting article in the online British Medical Journal. The url below will lead you to an extract, but the whole article is accessible after registration (which is free): http://www.bmj.com/content/321/7276/1589.extract

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