Unuses

[Alice Faber]

Ed Keer wrote:
> I have a friend who works at a well known news
> organization. He says that they use "unsite" and
> "unhave" as verbs in written communications about
> stories:
>
> "Unhave India-Tsunami, pls resend." means "I don't
> have the India-Tsunami story, please resend it."
>
> "Unsite" means something like, "I don't see..."
>
> I don't think anyone ever uses them when speaking, but
> these sound awful to me. Has anyone ever talked about
> this?

My father worked for a major newspaper for his entire professional
career, from the early 1940s through the 1990s. I don't remember him
talking about these specific words, but he did talk about similar
"compressions", attributing them to cheapness (telegraphs used to charge
by the word).

--

Alice Faber