Post by Garrett WollmanPost by David KleineckeIs "aforethought" ever used anywhere except after "malice"?
Google Ngram suggests that "aforethought" is slightly more frequent
than "malice aforethought" but I didn't check to see if this was
artifactual. I briefly looked at COCA but gave up before figuring out
how to search it. (It apparently requires some sort of login, at
least if you use corpora.byu.edu's search interface.)
KWIC & sort by immediate left neighbor did the job well. I got 51
results, of which a handful had other left neighbors than "malice".
There's "benevolence a.", "callous a.", "knowledge a.", "planning a.",
"plans a." and "good will a." The rest have "malice" or "malicious" as
a close, not necessarily immediate left neighbor (e.g. "malicious, as
with direct aforethought").
So, in COCA, roughly 90% are preceded by "malice".
One of the hits was "Mallets Aforethought". There are a few other
parodistic titles like this in the Google results (Phallus, Malus, and,
yes, Alice),
--
Democracy means government by the uneducated,
while aristocracy means government by the badly educated.
-- G. K. Chesterton