Special to the Star
"Me fail English? That's unpossible!" – Ralph Wiggum, The Simpsons
Bridezilla. Man-crush. Affluenza. Vajayjay. Frankenfood. Crackberry. There are plenty of vogue words that jockey for position on Wordspy.com, the lexical equivalent of the Billboard Top 50.
Meanwhile, each week in Ideas, the Sunday Star publishes "The week's best invented words," releasing a pack of fresh neologisms into the ether.
While most new words have a half-life of weeks, some survive infancy, manage to become part of the lexicon proper, and are eventually recognized by spell-check.
Through overuse, some new words, such as the infamous metrosexual, even earn the ignominy of appearing on Matt Groening's annual list of Forbidden Words, published in his comic strip Life in Hell. (Past winners include tofurkey, blogosphere, monetize, synergy and phat.)
There is nothing out of the ordinary about the birth and death of fad lingo, a linguistic cycle akin to hula hoops or crocs. But a vogue prefix? Now that's a little more un-usual.
The un-trend first went mainstream in 2002 with Ikea's Unböring Manifesto, and the last few years have given us unmortgages, unconsumption, undesign – even unwords. And that's only the start.
Steven Hall's 2007 novel, The Raw Shark Texts, includes something called un-space, described as "the labelless car parks, crawl tunnels, disused attics and cellars, bunkers, maintenance corridors, derelict industrial estates boarded-up houses" – and on and on, concluding with, "the pockets of no-name-places under manhole covers and behind the overgrow of railway sidings."
Meanwhile, unschooling is experiencing a resurgence, along with ungifting and unconferences.
And last July, the Sunday Star published "The Untourist Guide" to Toronto.
I could keep unspooling examples such as these for many more paragraphs, but that would be unwise and undoubtedly uninteresting. I'll conclude my list of examples with a mention of the ultimate un-titled un-book, UN, Dennis Lee's 2003 collection of avant-garde poetry.
Why has un- become the prefix of the moment? Perhaps because we live in an undo culture, thanks to computer software that allows us to retrace our steps by hitting CRTL-Z. Our ability to reverse our mistakes with impunity is not only a digital convenience, it's a metaphor for our ideal relationship with the world at large.
Or perhaps, in our continuing efforts to distinguish ourselves from the herd, we seek out new, fresh experiences that require a radical inversion of traditional approaches and outcomes. We've become jaded seen-it-alls, tired of the predictable, always seeking out the opposite, be it undesign or untourism. Thus, the un- prefix has become shorthand for an idiosyncratic, thinking-outside-the-unbox approach.
Socio-cultural guesswork aside, it is clear that un- bends the eye and the ear in an effective manner, thus calling attention to itself. At the very least, its frequency of use justifies this unarticle.
Our obsession with the opposite, at least in an advertising context, can be traced back to 7UP, which, starting in the late 1960s, advertised its effervescent little bottle with the slogan "There's no cola like The Uncola."
With television and print ads that played with the prefix (the un and only; un in a million), Uncola was a clever campaign. But for Ben Yagoda, professor of journalism at the University of Delaware and author of When You Catch an Adjective, Kill It, using un- today is, well, a little unoriginal. Reached via email, Yagoda argued that Uncola "was clever at the time, but `the unmortgage' 30 years later is not."
They might roll off our tongues somewhat awkwardly, but words such as ungifting (giving donations instead of presents at Christmas) or unconference (a gathering at which participants determine the content of sessions) are grammatically kosher for word-nerd Yagoda.
At their worst, he suggests, such unwords "come off as kind of self-consciously cute" similar to the use of the suffix "age" on TV's Buffy the Vampire Slayer (e.g. slayage, sparkage, kissage).
Unlike a particular word, there appears to be less danger of wearing out un-, given its promiscuity. Caution, of course, must still be exercised, lest the double negative make its appearance.
In the pilot episode of Pushing Daisies, protagonist Ned admonishes his new business partner, Emerson Cod, for using the words zombie and undead. "Nobody wants to be un-anything," Ned says, "Why begin a statement with a negative? It's like saying I don't disagree. Just say you agree."
His witty banter would please the late George Orwell, who famously waged war against the double negative in his 1946 essay "Politics and the English Language."
As Orwell wrote, in a footnote, "One can cure oneself of the not un- formation by memorizing this sentence: A not unblack dog was chasing a not unsmall rabbit across a not ungreen field."
And so, this article has reached its unbeginning.
No comments:
Post a Comment