De-gaying

[Benjamin Barrett]

Delice or derice a child's hair?...BB

>-----Original Message-----
>From: American Dialect Society [mailto:ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU]
>On Behalf Of Laurence Horn
>
>Very nice.  And I like the fact that it conforms to my
>(admittedly not always reliable generalization on the use of
>de- as a category-changing prefix for denominal and
>deadjectival privative verbs; other attested examples are
>_de-stale_ (an old bagel), _de-rice_ a child's hair.  (As
>opposed to the less likely innovative verb "un-gay",
>"un-stale", "un-rice", given the absence of verbal bases for
>these.)  Yes, the verbs "unnerve", "unsex", and "unman" would
>be counterexamples to the generalization, but they were
>lexically established centuries ago, when the division of
>labor between un-verbs and de-verbs was not yet functional.
>
>Larry Horn
>