Law #30 - "Malintent"

This article was born because I used a non-existent word while writing in English.

The word was malintent and I genuinely thought it was a real word, until my word processor flagged it as non-existent, which sent me on a quest to find more about it and why it is often used, even though it does not exist.

I even found a joke which I expeditiously reproduced, but got no reaction, since my friends don’t have a sense of humor. I am reposting it here in the event some of my readers have.

The thing about malintent is that even though it does not exists, nothing can stop it from existing at some point. There are a lot of words in a lot of languages that appeared at various points in time because people adopted them in speaking on a day-to-day basis.

One classic example is tomorrow. Tomorrow is a modern word, but it used to not exist. It’s comprised of the words to and morrow. We all know what the first one means. As for the second, while it still has meaning today, it used to mean something different in the past.

Morrow’s archaic meaning was that of morning, according to Mirriam-Webster. So “I will be waiting to morrow” meant “I will be waiting the next morning”. Hence how tomorrow was born in the spoken language.

The precedent that exists in tomorrow suggests that one day, malintent will be just as accepted as a word as tomorrow is right now.

In other news, I updated the Substack with a logo (I realized I did not have one).

It’s like Martial Law, but with me instead of Sammo Hung. And writing instead of fighting. Pretty much everything else is the same. Except what’s different.

To end it on a high note (pun intended), I took a tone deafness test to establish if I am or not tone deaf. Missed only one pair of notes from Stage C (was supposed to say if note B is higher or lower than note A). That was arguably the hardest Stage, but hey, not trying to justify it - it’s a good feedback nonetheless.

Result: Not tone deaf!

Stage A: 12/12
Stage B: 12/12
Stage C: 11/12
Final score: 35/36 = 97%

Congratulations, you are not tone deaf!

It seems I am not tone deaf. Someone should tell that to my voice.

May everybody who read (and wrote) this have an awesome week!