[Lexicog] unlex-entries

[David Tuggy]

Yes, it's in computer-readable form, but these examples are interspersed
with going on 10K others. The collection started with idiom blends and
other phrasal blends. If any of you particularly wants it I can probably
share it.

(fwiw I'm doing a book to showcase the collection: I'll include a couple
of relevant paragraphs at the bottom of this missive. *All* the goofs
are real ones. The adverb "rudiclously" is one of my own making, of
which I am inordinately proud. It can be seen as a self-spoonerism on
"ludicrously", or a blend of that with "ridiculously", and it certainly
embodies its own meaning.)

Yes, "un-" is quite certainly acquiring a family of related meanings
some of which, if teased out properly, would help explain (but not
—never!— explain away) these beautiful structures.

--David T

Mike Maxwell wrote:

> David Tuggy wrote:
> > It's part of a family of families of interesting structures. E.g. "That
> > was the day I unyanked the television from the wall". I also have
> > collected usages of unfrayed, unfrazzle, unpeel, unrace, utterable,
> > unshovel; de-empty, dethaw, unthawed, unfrosted, unopen, unstraighten,
> > and (probably) others where words, many with a negative prefix like
> > "un-", wind up meaning the opposite of what you would have thought.
> Some
> > of these I have had multiple-y attested, and some seem standard for
> some
> > speakers. Standard for my wife, for instance, is the construction
> > exemplified in "I have really missed not seeing you." To me that would
> > only be appropriate when we have been together more than I wish.
> >
> > Anyway, it's a fascinating can of worms to swim in. Some day I'll
> > probably write a paper...if I get lucky.
>
> Sounds fascinating...is your collection in computer-readable form? Is
> it possible that un- has taken up an adversative sense? Something like
> an Unfortunate Series of Coincidences...
> --
> Mike Maxwell
> Linguistic Data Consortium
> maxwell at ldc.upenn.edu

—————————————

> Other goofs, instead of embodying the meaning, examplify persicely the
> opposite. Classic malapropisms are counter-iconic in this way: Mrs.
> Malaprop tries to wax elegant and culltured, and —Wa‑la!—[1] <#_ftn1>
> something rudiclously ineligant comes out instead. Of coarse—as is
> iconically appropo—she exposes her ingorance at the same time. An
> illiterate admitting to being iliterite is iconically with-it, but
> when he claims to be highly litterate he controdicts himself, flouting
> his own ignorance, so to speak.[2] <#_ftn2> So too when an English
> teacher (collage-educated, as a matter a fact) includes “grammer”
> among the subjects he expects to teach, you wonder if his grammer ever
> taught him any English. If a preacher asks the congregation to bow
> their eyes and close their heads,[3] <#_ftn3> or injoins them to
> gorifly their Father in Heaven, he manages, in simular fashion, to
> induce an anti-iconic mood of irreference. And the couple who
> rhapsodized, after their vacation in Alaska, over the beauty of its
> “mountain vistas of unsurpassing grandeur”, expressed it in langauge
> of, well, unsurpassing grandeur.
>
> Overlaping with these are bloopers (like that last one) which actually
> mean something in direct contradinction with what was intended. It is
> hard to underestimate[4] <#_ftn4> the pervacivity of this phenomonom.
> As Thurber has observed: “Ours is a precarious language, as every
> writer knows, in which the merest shadow line separates affirmation
> from negation, sense from nonsense, and one sex from the other.”[5]
> <#_ftn5> Some speakers or writers slip over the line so smoothily
> you’re not even oblivious of what’s happened; others do so so
> unganglily you can’t help fail to notice. Or you might feel like they
> said something sort of odd, but accept it all the less. Most people
> undisurbedly understand what was meant rather than what was said when
> told that Beauty found each room in the Beast’s palace to be even more
> beautiful than the next , or when a principal tells a gratuation
> audience, “Please wait until the end to hold your applause.” The Wall
> Street Journal reported of a crime wave: “Forget the statistics—there
> isn’t one person here who hasn’t experienced or doesn’t know someone
> who hasn’t been robbed.” Believe you not, this logically means, “each
> person here has experienced someone who has not been robbed, or else
> knows such a person”. It goes without reason that the author of the
> statement simply wasn’t unable to say clearly what he had in mind. In
> this way you can all too easily wind up denying that what you meant to
> say was not true, which is something that you probably want to avoid
> doing, if you can get away with it.
>
> All this illustrates our amazing ability to unstraighten bloopers out,
> be they complimentary or contradictionary, and not even realize that
> we are seeing through them. A TV writer can opine that “you would be
> hard pressed to say that there was no machine more important than the
> car in the last 100 years,” and there is so much marging for error
> that we understand him prefictly. When a woman described the language
> in a hospital emergency room with the phrase “no bars held”, many
> hearers took it abreast without never noticing it, a minority heard it
> as a blunder, a few figured she meant the bar had been lowered to the
> point that where it wasn’t really there any more, and yet, the amazing
> thing was was, was that they all knew what she meant, and it’s been
> excepted ever sense.
>
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> [1] <#_ftnref1> This appeared imprint, in a book wirten by a Ph. D.
>
> [2] <#_ftnref2> The actual claim was “A+ certified. … Very computer
> litterate.” It may well be that computer litercy must be deemed not to
> coincide with literacy per say. (The case is in fact empirically
> overwhelming.)
>
> [3] <#_ftnref3> Self-reported by Jamie Buckingham in a mazagine
> article that its refrence I have, naturly, missplaced.
>
> [4] <#_ftnref4> Or as otherwise stated, easy to misunderestimate.
>
> [5] <#_ftnref5> /Lanterns & Lances/ (1961), p. 55. To illustrate, he
> continues: “Forty years ago, /The Candle/, a literary monthly
> published at Ohio State University, ruined the point of a mild little
> essay of mine by garbling a salient quotation so that it came out ‘The
> gates of hell shall now prevail.’”
>


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