During the 1600s in England, a great many negative words were coined by adding the prefix “mis-.” That is, if you acknowledged someone or something, but then discovered you’d made a mistake, in those days you’d say you “misacknowledged.” There was also “missadd” in 1657 for summing poorly, misalter in 1641 for making an error in resewing a sleeve; misarrive in 1611 for showing up at the wrong address or wrong time, and more. It’s a long list.
The church was occasionally accused of miscanonizing people that really shouldn’t have been named saints, and if you wasted your time in some fruitless endeavor, well, you had just misbusied yourself.
The great majority of these words were perfectly common back in the 1600s, but only a few of them have survived. We still misdefine some words and misrepresent aspects of an argument, but we wasted no time dropping “missing” out of use — that’s “missing” as in mis-singing a song, by the way; nothing to do with losing someone or something.
Enough of the “mis-“ words are still in use that they still make sense to us, even though we hardly ever form new words by applying “mis-.” But existing words, from misprice to miscalculate, act as templates to suggest, correctly, what the old words must have meant.
Every once in a while, even now, a new “mis-” word appears. One recent one is “miswanting,” which appeared in the New York Times in 2000, and has been used in academic articles and books as well. When you “miswant” something, you think it’s going to make you happy. But then you get it, and it doesn’t. Gilbert and Wilson, two researchers who may have coined “miswanting,” explain that “Much unhappiness … has less to do with not getting what we want, and more to do with not wanting what we like.”
Another reason the “mis-” prefix might still make perfect sense to us is that it’s been around for ages. You can find versions of it in Old English, Old French, Old Saxon, and a bunch of other dead languages. Something very much like it even appears in Sanskrit and Slavonic, suggesting that it comes from that hypothetical ancestor of a huge number of languages, “proto-Indo-European.”
Since there were once dozens or hundreds of “mis-” words in English, it would be a mistake to think they were misconstructions — they’re still clear enough that you won’t misunderstand them. And they’re very simple, so you’re unlikely to misconstruct them. So go ahead and misword some things.
