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I like 'sublime' for that. It sounds like an object could have three states: lime, sublime, and superlime.

Something that is sublime would somehow be inferior to its lime counterpart. Like everything has an innate limeness.

Apparently it could have been like that, as it comes from 'sub'+'limen' ("threshold")

Disclaimer: I just googled "sublime etymology"

My favorite is "why is no one ever whelmed?". I've seen this many times in popular culture over the years. People get overwhelmed and underwhelmed but no one ever seems to just get whelmed, even though it's really the same thing as overwhelmed.

Subb! I suggest you make a backmal undertological antiposal about this.

Why? The stem is from Latin ponere, to put, so could theoretically work both ways

I probably should have said "a commonly used or understood root word".

It shows up rarely in that form in "standard" English, but the related morpheme "-ponent" shows up more often: component (put+together), exponent (put+out), proponent (put+forth). And then the "-pose" variants come from the same Latin root but modified via French: compose, expose, propose.