[Note: This post was updated on August 25, 2025.]
Q: You mention on your blog that “ulterior” seems to appear only in connection with “motive.” I wonder if you can come up with other adjectives that modify only one noun. Is there a word for a term like this?
A: You’re mixing up the media and you’re a bit off on the message.
Pat did say on the air that “ulterior” is seldom seen without “motive.” But this hasn’t been discussed on our blog, though we once wrote about the history and etymology of “ulterior.”
A Google search shows that “motive” (or its plural, “motives”) is the noun most frequently paired with “ulterior.” The distant runners-up are “ulterior purpose” and “ulterior design” (we counted both singular and plural versions).
These results are pretty much reflected in the pairings to be found in published references in the Oxford English Dictionary.
Confining ourselves to quotations in which “ulterior” means “lying beyond what is openly stated, avowed, or evident; intentionally kept in the background or concealed,” the OED has these mentions:
“Ulterior demands” (1735); “ulterior intentions” (1825); “ulterior designs” (1850, 1856); “ulterior aims” (1891); “ulterior purpose” (1866, 1877, 1912, 1963); and “ulterior ends” (1952).
The OED’s own editors, in various word definitions, use some of these phrases, as well as “ulterior significance.”
But there are eight uses of “ulterior motive” (or “motives”), including quotations from 1861, 1942, 1975, and 1980, as well as uses by the OED’s editors.
So it would seem that “ulterior” and “motive” have decided they belong together and have made a go of it, especially in recent decades.
Are there other such words that seem to be wedded to one another? Well, we don’t often see “vim” without “vigor.” Or “flotsam” without “jetsam.” Or “spick” without “span.” But those are (or were originally, in the case of “spick and span”) nouns, joined by a conjunction.
We can think of several predictable pairings of noun and adjective. A “dudgeon” is always “high” (so is a “roller”). An “end” is often “bitter,” and an “argument” is “heated.”
What’s more, a “fog” is generally “impenetrable,” a “bystander” is “innocent,” an “escape” is “narrow,” a “source” is “reliable,” a “slope” is “slippery,” and an “image” is “tarnished.”
You’ll notice that the examples we’ve given are notorious clichés. “Ulterior motive” hasn’t reached cliché status, at least not yet.
This doesn’t precisely answer your question, because those adjectives don’t appear exclusively in those phrases. And we don’t know if there’s an official word in linguistics for such pairings.
However, Fowler’s Modern English Usage (2nd ed., 1965), revised by Sir Ernest Gowers, has a term for words that are typically joined by a conjunction: “Siamese twins.” (Think of “bits and pieces,” and “shape or form.”) He notes that these are likely to be clichés, “lying in wait to fill a vacuum in the brain.”
Gowers says the category includes some verbal pairs that “can be divided and each partner live separately,” as well as some that can’t be separated without losing the meaning of the expression.
In the separable group are examples in which the one of the terms is merely for emphasis, as with “alas and alack,” “jot and tittle,” “betwixt and between,” “lo and behold,” “gall and wormwood,” and others.
Among the inseparables, Gowers says, are “spick and span,” “hue and cry,” “chop and change,” “hum and ha,” “bill and coo,” “odds and ends,” “thick and thin,” “flotsam and jetsam,” “ways and means,” and a host of others.
When Pat first became a newspaper editor (we won’t say how many decades ago), she noticed that the phrase “oil-rich Kuwait” was inevitable.
By some mysterious unwritten rule, Kuwait was always introduced as “oil-rich.”
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