Verse (and not the poetry type)

I'm constantly amazed (and it don't take much) with the English language, or is it the American language, and it's use of prefixes and suffixes. Take the simple word 'verse'.

RE-verse is usually associated with going backwards, PER-verse is something we all want to avoid, and IN-verse is good in small doses if you have the right shoes and a bar to hang from. I'll let you fill in all the blanks, this isn't a doctoral course...

In each of these cases if you used the root word to describe the opposite, you'd be laughed right out of town.

We could retreat to the comfortable confines of the good ol' internet and see what they have to say, but it's not too promising.

From our good friend, Wikipedia:

The term, obverse, and its opposite, reverse, describe the two sides of units of currency and many other kinds of two-sided objects - most often in reference tocoins, but also to paper currency, flags (see Flag terminology), medals, drawings, old master prints and other works of art, and printed fabrics. The terms may be interchanged respectively with the more casual, but less precise terms, such as "front" and "back" or, for coins only, "heads" and "tails" also occurs.

In many areas other than coins, reverse is used much more commonly than obverse. Front and reverse also may be used together more frequently.

Recto and verso are the equivalent terms for front and back used for the pages of books, especially illuminated manuscripts, and also often for prints and drawings.

I'm not even going to start on "recto-".........