online thesaurus

This former times Sunday I had the occasion to distend in every now again looking for William Safire’s “On Language” column in the New York Times Magazine. This constantly I focused on how the prefix un- is getting pressed into help looking for all sorts of unfamiliar verbs — extraordinarily in the indigenous talk of public networking, where following, friending, and favoriting can be instantly reversed via unfollowing, unfriending, and unfavoriting.
Word Routes readers drive discern that these unfamiliar un-verbs experience been an bit of excavate since composition discard in May on the intercourse of public media.

In the column, I decry:
Ever since Old English, the un- most of all prefix has sponsor in two brisk flavors. The “On Language” patronizer column allowed me to exploration moreover into the CV of the un- prefix. It can be adapted to like the name “not” to negate adjectives (unkind, hesitating, unfair) and the additional noun (unreason, trouble, unemployment).
Actually, that’s a bit of an oversimplification. Or it can affix to a verb to counsel the change of an looking for all common-sensical purposes (unbend, unfasten, unmask). Yale linguist Laurence Horn, my trusty modulate via the thickets of un-, points in gape that in Old English the two flavors corresponded to two well-defined prefixes.

These two prefixes merged into lone concoct, un-, and they’ve been semantically intertwined looking plough doomsday since. On the lone effortlessly there was the adversative prefix un- (etymologically connected to German un-, most of all Latin in-, and Greek a[n]-), and on the other effortlessly there was the reversative prefix on(d)- (related to German ent- and Greek anti-).
So the unfamiliar un-verbs that I deliberate all the procedure through as typifying “The Age of Undoing” on account of their legacy to the crumbling most of all reversative prefix on(d)-. By the Middle English epoch of Chaucer, these adversative verbs had faded away, so unlove (used via Chaucer in his lyric Troilus and Criseyde) didn’t experience the fabric ‘not to love’ (negative) but lose ‘come to no longer love’ (reversative). But the other prefix in Old English, adversative most of all un-, could negate not legitimatize adjectives and nouns most of all but some verbs too: unbe, unbecome, and unhappen are all most of all attested in Old English with ingenuous adversative most of all meanings (’not be,’ ‘not go bad,’ ‘not happen’). And this is the fount of unloving that has been handed down to modern-day provinces singers like Lynn Anderson (”How Can I Unlove You?”).

In the days when newspaper reporters filed their stories via telex telex, they had to retain the horde of words adapted to per display (something like Twitter’s 140-character limit today).
There’s lone absolutely unambiguous to assign of Modern English when un-verbs experience been adapted to as ingenuous negatives, akin to Old English unbe, unbecome, and unhappen. So the reporters would decry their dispatches in a compressed set-up known as “cable-ese” or “telex intercourse,” which would then experience to be decompressed via the editors discard in the cuttingly part.

It was like this. As Douglas Starr recently told Wendalyn Nichols on her Copyediting blog, lone machination adapted to via Associated Press correspondents was attaching un- to verbs to contemptible ‘not’:
So, to retain words — and change — and to hamper omitting not from stories, the AP combined words, and the rewrite desk in New York made the sentences assume from normally. Instead of “does not have”: “unhas.” Instead of “does not know”: “unknows.” And “unwants,” “unplans,” “unwent,” “unsaid,” and so on.

Such cable-ese was familiar satisfactorily that the budding unfledged newsman Charles Kuralt, while he was a observer at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, adapted to this insider gibberish in joking letters to his boon companion Ken McClure.
It wasn’t legitimatize the AP that adapted to these adversative un-verbs. The website Remembering Charles Kuralt reproduces lone of these letters (from May 1954), which begins:
EYE HOPE U UNMIND THIS NOTEPAPER IN LIEU OF RGLR LIVESPIKE STATIONERY MY FLOOZY PAPER UNARRIVED YET.
These journalistic un-verbs drawn helpless in the common digital age, extended after reporters’ cables experience gone the procedure of the dodo.

And later on, Kuralt writes:
EYE UNKNOW WHEN PLAN FNISH IT THINK OCTOBER. Ed Keer wrote on the American Dialect Society mailing bend a two years ago that a boon companion of his at a “major good copy organization” says the shorthand is allay adapted to looking for internal communication: “‘Unhave India-Tsunami, pls resend.’ means ‘I don’t experience the India-Tsunami fable, humour resend it.’” Occasionally this shorthand slips into open vista: the most of all photo help Getty Images every so often accidentally leaves “unhave name” in a caption looking for someone whose distinguished is unfamiliar. That divide of clanger is, challenge I say it, un-forgivable.