unfoil; annuls

[Laurence Horn]

On May 28, 2012, at 11:58 AM, Jonathan Lighter wrote:

> From Knology's current on-demand movie summaries. Go figure:
>
> "3  MUSKETEERS, THE (2011) D'Artagnan (Logan Lernan) and three of France's
> most elite warriors battle to unfoil a conspiracy."
>


The one below is I think more of a misspelling (and anyway I'd rather watch a docudrama about the actual spork than a movie about someone metaphorically compared to one).

But the one above is interesting; definitely creative morphology/word-formation and not a simple error.  For example, I find some (not a huge number, to be sure) related g-hits for "unfoil the plot", most of them along the same (presumably nonce) lines, relating to how Johnny Depp could have gone undercover to unfoil the plot, how communication problems in the intelligence community prevented anyone from managing to unfoil the 9/11 plot, how various fictional characters have to pull out all the stops to unfoil the plot against them, and so on.  It makes a certain kind of sense, given the general meaning of un-verbs (epitomized by "uncover").  Perhaps another factor, although this is more speculative, is the idea that if foil is thought of as a cover concealing a plot or conspiracy, to unfoil the plot is to remove the foil and hence to uncover and reveal the festering stew within.  (There are recipes calling for food to be cooked unfoiled, i.e. uncovered by removing the tin f!
 oil cover.)

The result is an apparently redundant un-verb, but that's what we also get with attested cases like "unrip", "unloose(n)", "undust", "untap", "unstring", "undrain", and "unthaw".  So welcome to the club, noble "unfoil"!  And who better to introduce you than a legendary swordsman like D'Artagnan?

LH

> "SPORK (2011) A film about a pink-cheeked, frizzy-haired outcast named
> SPORK who is trying to navigate her way through the annuls of Junior High.
> Starring Savannah Stehlin, Sydney, Park, Rachel G. Fox."
>
> JL
>
>
>
> --
> "If the truth is half as bad as I think it is, you can't handle the truth."
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org

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The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org