On prevariacation and prefixes

​On prevarication and prefixes.
 
Prevarication is an author’s bane and although I’m not really a ‘prevaricator’ (and yes, that word exists) I recognise that it comes in many forms ranging from ‘I must just slip out to the shops; I’ll make myself a coffee; must walk the dog and so on. One of my favourite forms of prevarication comes from curiosity about the language itself, but perhaps, on reflection, it’s more an obsessive disorder. It happens when I select a word from our extensive range of vocabulary and then begin to wonder about the etymology. It truncates my current flow until I’ve sorted it. It’s a tyrant of my own making! The most recent occurrence was with the prefix be-. You won’t begrudge me bemoaning (or bewailing) how it paralysed my writing until I’d got to the bottom of it. I’m bespectacled as I write this, by the way.
 
It appears that its most common meaning is “around” or “on all sides,” as in the words bejewel, meaning to cover with jewels, bespatter, meaning to spatter on all sides, and besiege, meaning to surround a location during a siege. This is also the sense we see in bewildered, which figuratively means to be lost in or surrounded by a mental wilderness.
But the prefix be- can also do many other things as well. It can be privative, which means it
removes or deprives you of something, as in the word behead.
It can be causative, as in the word befuddle. “Fuddle” was a 16th c. verb meaning “to get
drunk,” so to befuddle originally meant to cause someone to be confused by getting them
drunk.
The be- prefix is sometimes used for effect or intensification, as in the word bedraggle.
“Draggle” is a 16th century word that means “to make something wet and muddy,” so
“bedraggle” more or less the same thing, but making it extra wet and muddy.
This prefix can create transitive verbs, as in bewail, which means to loudly complain about
something. The prefix turns “wail” from an intransitive verb—one that doesn’t need an
object—to a transitive verb, which does need an object. So I can just wail, or I can bewail
an unfortunate circumstance.
This is also what’s happening in the word begrudge: Grudge was originally a verb, and it
meant “to grumble or murmur in complaint” (originally the imitative grutch, from the
Middle English grucchen).
So if to “grudge” is to grumble, then the transitive form in “I begrudge you your success”
means that your success causes me to grumble.
Be- words were immensely popular in the 15th- and 16th-century. Some of fantastic
examples that are no longer in use include…
bethwack “thrash soundly”  betongue “verbally thrash someone”
befool “make a fool of” beshrew, meaning “deprave, pervert or corrupt”
It is also privative in the word bemused, which means “puzzled or confused.” The base
word here is “muse” in the sense of musing or pondering something, so to be amused
literally means that something is holding your attention and interesting to you, causing
you to muse about it, and therefore to be bemused is literally to have your ability to muse
or think about a subject taken away by confusion.
 
In writing this, I have freely drawn on an informative blog by Jess Zafarris, who is the author of Once Upon a Word: A Word-Origin Dictionary for Kids. She is also an award-winning innovator of digital content and marketing solutions and a prolific online and print journalist. I can heartily recommend her content to anyone interested.