"(un)impregnable": hypernegation or hyponegation?

[Laurence Horn]

On an article lauding the Texas Rangers’ defense in today’s NYT sports section, I did a double-take on reading that 

“The defense—anchored by shortstop Elvis Andrus and the impregnable glove of Adrian Beltre at third base—has saved more runs above average than any other team but the Rays.”

Once I got past the metaphor in which baseball gloves may or may not become pregnant, my first thought was that the writer (Neil Payne) had meant “unimpregnable”, i.e. incapable of being impregnated, just as “uninflammable” means 'incapable of becoming inflamed'.  I checked the OED and found to my surprise that, as they say, “there is no such word” as _unimpregnable_, and that the im- (i.e. iN-) of _impregnable_ can only be a negative prefix, so that _impregnable_ already (officially) means what I had thought _unimpregnable_ would mean, rendering the doubly-prefixed form otiose.  Evidently, _unimpregnable_ does not and never did exist.  

Except that it did and does.  Google Books includes 300 or so hits for _unimpregnable_ (while asking me if I meant _impregnable_), including one from William Harvey’s classic 17th century treatise on the circulation of the blood, several from assorted 19th century journals, monographs, and novels, one from a 1917 novel by Jack London ("Had he been more than a normal thoroughbred dog, he would have continued to assail his unimpregnable enemy until…"), one from a 2010 novel by Francine Prose ("Having been incarcerated in the Castel Sant'Angelo, he had somehow escaped Valletta's unimpregnable fortress-prison and had left the district without permission…”), and so on.  Of course, _unimpregnable_ has the virtue (absent, I would argue—with some support from regular Google entries—from its monoprefixal counterpart) of being unambiguous.  But officially, it seems, _unimpregnable_ is a hypernegation, and the NYT sportswriter was not employing a hyponegation.  Go know.  (I still think _unimpregnable_ *is* a word and belongs in the OED, though.)

LH 

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