Thaw vs. Unthaw

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Willie calling from Indianapolis.

Hey, Willie, welcome.

How are you doing?

I am doing fine, thank you.

What can we help you with today?

Well, my wife and I have a bet on if this word is a real word or not.

She uses the word unthaw.

So if you take chicken or hamburger out of the freezer,

And she’ll say, take the hamburger out so it can unthaw and we can make dinner.

I say that the word is thaw.

You don’t have unthaw.

You thaw it out.

So it’s been an ongoing debate in our family, so we decided to call you so you can tell us who’s right or who’s wrong.

Oh, my, Willie, what’s writing on this?

Dinner for a week.

Okay, and will this be frozen food?

No, I don’t think so.

My question for you, Willie, is what is the price of being right with your spouse?

Yeah, exactly.

It’s a high price, right?

I mean, one way or the other, one of you is going to come out the loser.

We’ve got to work on this, and we’re going to figure out a 50-50 answer so you can both be right.

How about that?

Okay, that sounds good.

I’ve got that for you.

I can line that up for you right now.

So you take this to her as a peace treaty, and you both do dinner together, all right, for a week.

Okay.

That’s sweet.

Here’s the thing.

Unthaw is actually a word, and it’s existed as far back as the 1500s.

It does mean thaw. It is a synonym for thaw. It’s this strange, strange, strange word. We have a few of these in English where it appears to be the opposite of the thing that it means. But it isn’t. It’s just like a, it’s a reinforced version of thaw. That un here isn’t so much a negative as it’s emphasizing the reduction of the freezing, the absence of the cold, the unfreezing of the thing, the thawing of the thing.

It is so common, actually, that it is in my copy of The Joy of Cooking.

They use unthaw when they talk about unthawing frozen vegetables or unthawing frozen fruit.

Oh, really? No kidding.

Wow.

And you said there are other words like that.

I’m thinking of ravel and unravel.

That’s a great word.

Peel and unpeel.

Do you unpeel an orange or do you peel an orange?

You do both.

I peel an orange.

If I saw unthaw, I would be with Willie on this one.

Here’s the thing.

Willie’s question was, is it a word? And the answer is, it is a word. It’s a word. He didn’t ask, should we avoid it? He didn’t ask, is it useful in formal writing? Or does the word make sense? Right. It does make sense. You just can’t overanalyze it. And to pretend that its component parts are somehow the only thing that matter. What matters is how it’s used.

So, Willie, it’s a word. It is definitely a word. But she probably shouldn’t use it. She shouldn’t use it in formal writing or speech. Around the house, it’s totally fine.

Okay, gotcha. Yeah. That’s kind of the middle ground for you guys, which is like thaw is the better choice. You see, the problem is here we can’t reanalyze this word and decide that it only means thaw plus un. It means thaw. Right. Really, we’re overanalyzing things. This is the life mistake that we make. That’s why we’re here.

Okay, well, it sounds like that it’s 50-50, so it sounds like it’ll still be good in my household. I would say the best thing that comes out of this is that you and your wife spend some time in the kitchen together making things that you both love to eat. There are worse things, right, Willie? There are much worse things, correct.

All right. Thanks for calling. Let us know how it turns out, okay? Okay. Thank you so much. Cheers. All right. Thanks, Willie. Bye-bye. Bye.

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