Talk:back-

back-
Prefix. Sense: Situated, located, or toward the rear; backward or in reverse; in return; again.

The words using this purported prefix would seem to actually be compounds formed from back. backbite is from back (ahistorically, anyway). backfriend: might be from the other, unchallenged sense of back-. DCDuring TALK 02:28, 1 September 2011 (UTC)


 * Well, if we remove the first sense, leaving only the second, wouldn't that cause confusion? Especially for words like backfill:? Leasnam 04:06, 1 September 2011 (UTC)
 * What about backformation, backdating, and others like them, indicating reversal in time? bd2412 T 04:34, 1 September 2011 (UTC)
 * All of those seem to be formed by compounding of the adverb to me. Is everyone really sure that even the "backfriend" instance is not a compound. Does "back" have a similar extended meaning to that sense of "back-" with the same dialectal distribution?
 * How is it less confusing to suggest that back- is a prefix? We could always remedy the "confusion" by adding a usage note or directing users to back in some way analogous to . DCDuring TALK 13:50, 1 September 2011 (UTC)
 * back-friend: doesn't seem to be limited to the sense of "false friend". Some scholars seem to think it is derived from back and spell it without a hyphen. A synonym would be shoulder-clapper, "arresting officer".
 * I believe this may be another etymology (not shown at the entry), where backfriend = "a friend who's got your back". Quite the opposite meaning to false friend. Leasnam 16:57, 2 September 2011 (UTC)
 * Are there any other instances of a term derived using "back-" in the sense of "false"? There may be another way of avoiding all this confusion. DCDuring TALK 14:04, 1 September 2011 (UTC)
 * I would say that backdate implies not only putting an earlier date on something, but in some cases doing so for purposes of falsification. For example, an author might backdate a manuscript in order to claim that his writing came before someone else. bd2412 T 19:07, 2 September 2011 (UTC)
 * But it isn't the back- part of the word that carries that meaning. The word backdate means merely "to put an earlier date on"; the fact that people often do so for fraudulent reasons isn't part of the meaning of the word, and certainly isn't part of the morphology of the word. —Angr 20:12, 2 September 2011 (UTC)
 * Kept as no consensus. — Ungoliant (Falai) 15:31, 13 August 2012 (UTC)