UN-words

[James A. Landau]

In a message dated >  Wed, 29 Oct 2003 14:25:11 -0500,  Laurence Horn <
> laurence.horn at YALE.EDU> responds to FRITZ JUENGLING <
> juengling_fritz at SALKEIZ.K12.OR.US>
>
>
> >
> >What's a 'dergraduate'?
> >Fritz
>
> From the German obviously--
> Der graduate   vs.   Undergraduate

More exactly, "der Graduate" is someone who has left college with a
bachelor's degree.  Der Undergraduate therefore is someone who has completed college
and has subsequently gotten married.

An amusing use of "un-":  the late science fiction writer Poul Anderson wrote
a novella entitled "UN-man" (also used as the title of a book containing
several Anderson stories).  The title character is
   1) a genetically altered human
   2) a Schwartzeneggeresque secret agent for the United Nations.

Well-written office software offers various "UNDO" options, such as "unbold",
"undelete", etc.  (One can imagine an "unetc" which trims items off a list.)
I have always considered "undelete" to be an unfelicitous name for a most
felicitious operation.

A word processor for which I have fond memories was Word-11 (on the DEC
PDP-11 minicomputer).  One key on the keyboard was designated as the "Gold key"
(and on our keyboards had a piece of gold foil taped on it).  Pressing the gold
key before a function key reversed the action of the function key, e.g. if you
pressed the gold key before the boldfacing key you removed rather than adding
boldface.  The gold key was most welcome since Word-11's
puppy-dog-user-friendliness made it quite easy to convert half your document to boldface (or
italics or whatever).  This blessed keystroke combination was known as "gold bold".

          - James A. Landau