Conflicting Meanings of Prefix “Un”

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Doug going from San Diego.

What prompted you to take time out of your busy day to give us a call?

Well, I wanted to know why the prefix UN works so very differently in, for example, two different words, undone and unmarried.

If something has been undone, that means it was done to begin with and now has been undone.

If someone is not married, we say they are unmarried, but not because they were married, but they had their marriage undone or reversed.

They have not had an annulment or a divorce, necessarily, but they are merely not married at this time.

So I was wondering why the prefix UN, un, works for both of those, and it doesn’t necessarily mean a marriage that has been well undone.

Well, let me ask you, are you sure that undone and unmarried always mean the things that you’ve just said?

Does unmarried always mean that somebody has never been married?

No, no. I assume I take unmarried to mean someone who’s simply not married at this time, which to me means that we could just say they are not married.

It doesn’t necessarily mean someone who’s never been married, just someone who is not currently married.

Right.

But putting the prefix in front of it, the way you do with undone, with the word undone, it means that something that was done has now been, well, undone.

That’s how it works for it, so I have to repeat that word.

But couldn’t you say that something like, the chores around the house go undone unless I do them?

Ooh.

Yeah.

Two things, because you’re so close to answering your own question.

You’re just a hair away from it.

One is that on has a meaning as a morpheme, as we call it in linguistics.

A morpheme is a unit of language that has a meaning but can’t really function as a word on its own.

In this case, on is kind of a negation or reversal of whatever it’s attached to.

So on attached to done or unattached to married, right?

Right.

So what it does, it kind of either negates it, turns it negative, or it kind of reverses the meaning.

But the thing is, it really is heavily dependent upon two other things.

The meaning of the root that it attaches to, and the meaning of the sentence as a whole, which is why it gave you that other possibility, the other way to use undone that might mean something slightly different.

So what you’re going to find here is that un isn’t always exactly the same thing in every word that it’s a part of.

Right.

And so this is where we run into variability of language.

And you’ll find that a lot of the prefixes like dis, D-I-S, work that way.

You know what? I was going to ask you if Grant has helped you unravel this question.

But what do you do with unravel?

Because to unravel a sweater means that it unravels.

Oh, my head hurts.

To unravel is to perform the function that we would also refer to as unraveling.

Right, right, to separate the fibers or the threads.

Oh, man.

Well, that seems to me to open the door to things like irregardless, and I cringe even to say that word.

Well, another place that we run into something like that is, some people will describe a full box, a box that still has all of its things in it, as an unpacked box.

Whereas if it was also empty, you could also call it an unpacked box.

An unpacked box, yeah.

Well, I would draw the line there, not because I think it’s not correct, but because I would myself never say that.

Yeah, it’s an interesting paradox, and one of the things when you think about it too closely, it kind of evaporates under your vision.

Oh, Doug. Well, what are you going to think about now?

Well, whatever it is, when I think of it, I will be contacting you.

All right.

Thank you so much, Doug. Bye-bye.

Thank you so much. Bye now.

Well, bad spellers of the world, untie.

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