The Unwords of Unworld

I finished copy-editing and source-checking the etymonline entries in the T section at the end of September. In the twilight I combed out the twigs and looked U-ward. The letter lay open and level-looking as a Roman road.

At a long-gone bookstore for $20 or so in the last century I picked up a volume of the old, original Oxford English Dictionary.

That was before I thought of writing dictionaries; I bought it as an artifact, to be able to study a sliver of that intellectual monument; to hold the heft of it, to touch the impress of metal types on the book-paper, to run a fingertip down a column of pure Clarendon.

It stood alone on the bookstore shelf. Who gets rid of just one volume of an OED? I looked closer; of course it was the U- volume, the dullest in the set, no doubt, nothing but un- words. I guessed I knew why the owner exiled it.

I know better now. It's a haunted mirror, it's the whole dictionary all over again with un- stuck in front of every word.

There's an atmosphere of reversal, of stifling, a sense of treacherous rotten floorboards. The world is flipped and played in reverse. Every verb, noun, adjective that wanders into un- gets stripped or flipped, reversing it or confusing it.

You feel a bit surprised to meet un- words without a negating or reversing sense, like uncle, that seem to have wandered in benighted from some other part of the alphabet. They make no thing vanish; what business have they here? Uncle and the Universe and the Union Jack kill time in the upside-down airport bar, longing for better beer and a flight out.

Streets and cafes are quietly psychotic; words walk with their opposites in their eyes. Bridges rise and vanish mid-span; as in Escher-world, sets of stairs arc across clashing dimensions. You think yourself inside a painting of a painting painted into itself.

Thank God un-un- constructions are unwieldy and unwelcome. Were they to exist, the hall of mirrors would snap into alignment and break English. There are said to be compilations of "The Thousand and One Nights" stories that include the story of Scheherezade and the Thousand and One Nights. Such dangers are to be touched only by long spoons and tenfoot poles, they are thin ice over hot wormholes, potential infinite repetition.

And at the core of that haunted place you run up against ungood, straight out of Anglo-Saxon via George Orwell. The words beginning with un- form the description of the unseeing unlearning thing the modern human world is hellbent on being.

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Practically, there are two uns- but they are seamless to us. The un- with verbs reverses an action or the idea of an action. The one with adjectives-from-verbs can mean that the suggested action is impossible. The first un- often implies something has happened; the second, that it has not happened or cannot happen.

These result in accidental relations, of words built off the same verb but formed in different times and brains. Uncomfortable step-siblings must share bunks in the dictionaries. To be unmade in English at various times can mean "never having been made," therefore "eternal, lasting forever," or "forever ruined and ended." In one it's the past of unmake, in the other the reverse of made.

An unpraying man is "not praying," or he is praying plenty (if from obsolete unpray "revoke or negate by a second prayer"). To be unsainted is to be deprived of saintly character, or to never have had one.

Unmeaning is "having no sense;" unmeant is of things that have a sense (not intended). A bottle that can be unstopped is far from unstoppable. In Middle English medical texts, unshowed is "imperceptible." But in Chaucer and the Rolls of Parliament, it means "undisclosed, not revealed."

Un- can do double-negative duty on verbs that already have a sense of divestment or releasing: Unloose "to loosen;" unpeel "to peel;" unskin "remove a layer of tissue," alongside skin (v.); unpick "pick (a lock, with burglar's tools)."

These date from all periods of the language. Middle English has unspring "bloom, burst forth;" unrip "strip (a house of roof tiles)." Among the Elizabethans, Nashe has in works two years apart unshelled "not taken out of the shell" and unshell "divest of a shell." Ben Jonson has unrude "very rude;" Cowley unremorseless (1634).

A subculture of un-words are those where un- fixes on a positive word to create a shadow negative. Sad, sorrowful, are not the same as unglad. Sad is anchored in a feeling; unglad is adrift in an absence. Or perhaps unglad is more understated than sad, and thus more terrible. A sad person can hope to be a happy one tomorrow. The gloom of unglad feels irreversible.

Pitiless is a biting word, but we've left behind a haunted noun, and a needed one, in unpity "unrighteousness, hardheartedness, impiety, cruelty" and all its family. The Bible translations and sermons of the late 14th century are full of it.

Sche stode stille, and then they toke hure and with an vnpiteuouse cruelnesse slowe hure. ["Speculum Sacerdotale," c. 1425]

Do you sometimes lately feel in a state of unpower ("helplessness, inability to act" late 14th century) and feel inspired to be unslow ("active, diligent")? The subtleties and ambivalences in it allow great latitude. Assuredly unlong is politer than "short;" indeed on the list are more than a few not-unuseful words. Do I look unfat in this outfit?