File under: Say it ain't so

[Laurence Horn]

At 2:12 PM -0400 10/23/10, Federico Escobar wrote:
>"Unpick" also struck me as an interesting choice of words. It was probably
>suggested --I'm speculating gratuitously-- by the ideas of precision and
>care conveyed by "picking a lock"; since the alleged precision of Austen's
>style was "undone" by the new study (which I'm surprised it took 200 years
>to perform), then it was "unpicked."

I wouldn't think so, at least as far as the lock-picking goes.  The
use of "unpick" for 'pick (a lock)', as a directly pleonastic un-verb
of the "unloose", "unthaw", "unempty" variety, has long been archaic.
The much more standard use over the last few centuries is related to
sewing or knitting:  to unpick a sweater or whatever is to remove the
stitches.  So here it's the garment Austen's prose styling carefully
(or perhaps not so carefully) constructed, along with her reputation,
that would be "unpicked" by this finding.  Perhaps relevant is the
first OED cite for this sense of "unpick":

1808 JANE AUSTEN Let. 7 Oct. (1932) I. 217 Your gown shall be unpicked.

LH

>
>I also noticed that the author seemed inexplicably surprised by the blots
>and crossings. The explanation I supplied was that it was a way of opposing
>the description of Austen's writing process offered by her brother:
>that "everything
>came finished from her pen". She probably emphasized the blots to unpick
>people's idea of publisher-ready mansucripts flowing steadily and
>unblotchedly from Austen's pen.
>
>F.
>
>
>
>
>On Sat, Oct 23, 2010 at 1:58 PM, Jonathan Lighter
><wuxxmupp2000 at gmail.com>wrote:
>
>>  ---------------------- Information from the mail header
>>  -----------------------
>>  Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
>>  Poster:       Jonathan Lighter <wuxxmupp2000 at GMAIL.COM>
>>  Subject:      Re: File under: Say it ain't so
>>
>>
>>-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>
>>  Note too Prof. Sutherland's use of "unpick" to mean "undo" (generally).
>>  (OED
>>  allows for a "fig." sense, but the below has no metaphorical context):
>>
>>
>>  "Austen's unpublished manuscripts unpick her reputation for perfection in
>>  various ways: we see blots, crossings out, messiness -- we see creation as
>>  it happens, and in Austen's case, we discover a powerful
>>  counter-grammatical
>>  way of writing."
>>
>>  Fascinating is the gratuitously defensive phrase, "a powerful
>>  counter-grammatical way of writing." All writers (with the famously alleged
>>  exception of Shakespeare) blot, cross out, etc., all the time. Irrespective
>>  of any later editorial improvement, that is not a weakness in Jane Austen's
>>  writing. It just shows she had no word-processor.
>>
>>  BTW, a second look an hour later reveals that Yahoo has nonsexistically
>>  replaced the invidious "male editor" headline.
>>
>  > JL
>>

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