Unuses

[Laurence Horn]

At 6:34 PM +0100 2/25/05, Amorelli wrote:
>Looks like an overdose of 'Newspeak' (cf. George Orwell's '1984', first
>published in 1949!), although the Author's imagination did not extend to
>rendering 'sight' semi(?)-phonetically.
>M.I.Amorelli
>Faculties of Law and Economics,
>University of Sassari

I'm pretty sure Newspeak only generalizes "un-" for adjectives, where
it is used productively to replace "negative" contraries:  "ungood"
for "bad", "unstrong" for "weak", "doubleplusungood" for "very bad",
etc.  Curiously, although I'm not sure Orwell was aware of it,
Newspeak in this respect precisely mirrors earlier stages of English:
================
There is...considerable restriction in the use of un- with short
simple adjectives of native origin, the negative of these being
naturally supplied by another simple word of an opposite
signification.  There is thus little or no tendency now to employ
such forms as unbroad, undeep, unwide, unbold, unglad, ungood,
unstrong, unwhole, [etc.] which freely occur in the older language.
(OED, un- 1, 7; the same general asymmetry (described by Jespersen,
Zimmer, and others) evidently obtained in the "older language" as in
Newspeak in that no adjectives of the form "unbad", "unweak",
"unnarrow" are attested.)

But I'm pretty sure Orwell didn't generalize this to verbs.  On the
other hand, earlier English--through Middle and Early Modern
Eng.--lacked the aspectual constraint on un-verbs we now do, so it in
fact allowed verbs like "unbe", "unbetide" ('not to happen'),
"untrusten", "uncomprehend", "unbecome".  There's apparently no
"unhave" as such--but the OED does include one nonce occurrence of
"unhaving" coupled with "unknowing":

1449 PECOCK Repr. I. xvi. 89 For harme which y haue knowen come bi
defaut and the vnhauying and the vnknowing of this..consideracioun.

But I have to admit that the replacement of "lack" with "unhave", as
below, does seem to be in the spirit if not the letter of Newspeak.

Larry

P.S.  There are a handful of cites for "unsee", but it's not like the
"unsite" below, a simple 'not to see', but rather the standard
change-of-state meaning we get with modern "unwrap", "unsay",
"unhappen":

1865 J. GROTE Explor. Philos. I. 243 We cannot unsee the prospect before us.
1871 KINGSLEY At Last xvii, At last we had seen it; and we could not unsee it.

>----- Original Message -----
>From: "Ed Keer" <edkeer at YAHOO.COM>
>To: <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
>Sent: Thursday, February 24, 2005 9:56 PM
>Subject: Unuses
>
>>---------------------- Information from the mail
>>header -----------------------
>>Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
>>Poster:       Ed Keer <edkeer at YAHOO.COM>
>>Subject:      Unuses
>>-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>
>>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?
>>
>>Ed
>>
>>
>>
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