Earnful Earn”ful, a. [From Earn to yearn.] Full of anxiety or yearning. [Obs.] –P. Fletcher.
What a strange word: Earnful. As in, full of earn. The proper definition is “full of anxiety” but earnful sounds like it wants to describe a vessel full of earn, where “earn” is just a part of full-out earnestness. “Earn” is only the gesture, or the facial expression of concentration and the work of deep thought, but it is not the full equation.
Sing a song of sixpence, a pocket full of earn.
The word “reckless” randomly prances through my conscious mind sometimes. The word reminds me of an interview with Judith Exner. Larry King introduced her as a weirdly prestigious if vestigial connection to the JFK/Camelot mystique. Basically, he banged her (JFK, that is, not Larry King).
Among other pronouncements Ms. Exner described the president as “reckless”. That word puzzled me until I realized how it was spelled. It is not “wreckless” but “reckless”. For years, though, I thought it was “wreckless” and to me the meaning of the word as used in common parlance seemed self-referentially oxymoronic. “Lacking in wreck” sounds perfectly safe to me, so why would JFK’s dangerous dalliances be described as that?
Thus every time that word tramps about my mind I re-visit the always-hard-to-remember logic by which I remember that the word is not spelled “wreckless” but “reckless” and thus it does not mean “lacking in wreck” but rather “lacking in reck” and “reck” has something of a relationship in spirit if not etymology with “reckoning”. Thus I laboriously and over the years repeatedly have explained to myself that Judith Exner said JFK was “reckless” not “wreckless” and that she should not have chosen “wreckful” even if that’s a better sounding word.
Earnful, though. That’s a new one. well, no it’s not, it’s an old one. An old, obsolete one that is no longer in use. But it’s new to me, and it’s amusing to think of earnestness broken down to its constituent parts.
Its original and now obsolete meaning has no traction, but a well-paid laborer could describe herself as “earnful” if only to make an impression on a resumé. “From 2008-2011 I was earnfully employed at XYZ Company…”
