Cranberry Morphemes

More specifically, these are fossil words. I'll post more every few days.

ulterior

As in ulterior motive. Nothing else is ever ulterior, is it? "I suspect she has ulterior sandwiches." No one says that. Ulterior comes from the Latin word meaning "further." It's actually the comparative form of the Latin word ulter, where we get our prefix ultra-, so ulterior basically means "more ultra." I guess motives can be ulterior when they go further than the ostensible motive.

 fro

As in to and fro. It's an old form of the Old Norse word fra used in Scotland and northern England. It's a cognate of the word from.

mum

As in mum's the word. It was a Middle English interjection equivalent to Shut up! or Quit yer yappin'! In early modern English it came to be an adjective meaning "silent." Now we only use it in the phrase mum's the word, which may be inspired by a line from Shakespeare's Henry VI, Part 2: "Seal up your lips, and give no words but mum." This word is etymologically unrelated to the homophonic pet name for a mother. They do, however, share a basic root in onomatopoeia. The fossil word mum imitates the sound of humming, while mamma (which mum is an abbreviation for) imitates the sound of a suckling child. The same sound is at the root of many words related to motherhood: mother, ma, maternal, mom, mammal, mammary.