There are qualifiers that occur only with the word they happen to qualify but not with any other word. A punishment and a remark can both be fitting or appropriate, but only a punishment is condign. One does not hear or read 'condign remark.' Is 'condign' ever used apart from 'punishment'? That is one question. A second: What is the technical term for this linguistic phenomenon? There is one, but I can't remember what it is.
A reader supplied this bit of linguistic evidence that answers my first question: "Scotus's proposed replacement way of drawing the distinction between condign merit and congruous merit is quite complicated. Underlying it is the claim that the reward for condign merit is everlasting life, and that the reward for congruous merit is the gift of sanctifying grace (i.e., justification)." (Richard Cross, Duns Scotus, p. 105)
As for the second question, I thought the answer might be hapax legomenon. But that term refers to a word or phrase that occurs but once in a corpus, a phenomenon which is similar to but distinct from the phenomenon I am referring to.
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