Quality, knives and uncut words: A late autumn ramble

I write these words on a windless, cloudless, warm late autumn Sunday afternoon. Sweetheart Vivienne’s flown off to appear in the Sydney Writers’ Festival [1]. I’m home alone. I feel sleepy. Lethargic, Lazy. My mind wanders. Hither and thither. Free associating. Giving birth to today’s Farmdoc’s Blog post: a musing meandering ramble:

I’ve previously written of my thoughts on Quality – which I owe in large part to Robert Pirsig [2]. Regarding consumer items, quality’s essentially proportional to price. But as price increases, the incremental quality increase tapers off. So the things I buy are generally half way along the quality/price continuum.

Four weeks after my post about Riedel glasses [3], today’s photograph’s of our set of Wüsthof Trident knives. Wüsthof, founded in 1814, based in Solingen in Germany, and family-owned for seven generations, makes the highest quality knives [4, 5]. Sweetheart Vivienne and I treasure ours. We hope they become heirlooms.

Segueing on from literal to figurative cutting, I’ve started a collection – well okay, a list – of words which have prefixes or suffixes and which aren’t (to my knowledge, anyway) in common usage without their end-bits. So far I have three, i.e. uncouth, unkempt, ruthless. Have you ever come across the words couth, kempt or ruth? And can you tell me of other words that lengthen this list? If you can, please share them via a Comment. Thanks.