Unthawed

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Carol. I’m living in Hamden, Connecticut.

Okay, but you’re not from there, are you?

No, I’m from Tennessee.

Okay, that’s what I thought I heard.

Well, welcome to the show.

Welcome to the show, Carol. What can we do for you?

Thank you. As you know, I grew up in Tennessee, and so did my stepfather.

And most of my adult life, I’ve heard him use the term unthaw.

And in context, he means unfreeze or whatever most people say, thaw.

And I’ve always thought it was an illogical negative and it was not really a proper word.

And then I saw it in the National Food magazine recently and was very surprised.

So I thought I would ask the authorities and see what you had to say about unthaw versus thaw.

-huh.

Well, now, Carol, what did you see exactly in the magazine?

Well, the magazine gave an ingredient and it said so much corn unthawed.

They meant frozen then?

Well, perhaps they did.

But do you think that maybe they meant thawed, but they said unthawed, just like your father-in-law?

It’s a good question.

In context, it was a cornbread recipe calling for frozen corn kernels, and in parentheses it says unthawed.

So maybe they really meant put them in the recipe frozen.

Yeah, that could well be.

It’s tricky, isn’t it?

Because people do that all the time.

They’ll mix those un-words with their direct opposite, and they’ll say one thing but mean another.

To me, it’s unnecessarily confusing, but I’ve heard my stepfather use it truly to mean thaw, and that has to be incorrect.

Well, it’s a dialectal form.

You’ll see it both in this country and in places like Tennessee and also in Britain.

And you see that with other words, too, like unloose.

I remember my dad used to say unloose your shoes.

Mm-And there are a couple things happening here. Sometimes, Carol, this is what’s called a performance error. It doesn’t mean something that happens in the bedroom. It means somebody doesn’t say quite the thing they meant to say.

But there’s also something called haplology, which is somebody might mean un-unthawed, but they say unthawed. That is, they’re leaving out one syllable, which should be repeated. Haplology is H-A-P-L-O-L-O-G-Y.

And there’s a couple other things happening here.

There are really great cases where somebody can use the untharm for emphasis.

You might talk about your house being still unpacked,

And you actually mean everything is still packed,

And you mean you haven’t unpacked it yet.

So there are a lot of different things happening here,

And I hesitate, Martha, to call this always a performance error

Because so many people are doing it.

Yeah, and it’s weird.

So unthaw can mean thaw, but unthawed usually means still frozen.

So I don’t know if that was your father’s kind of locution in the magazine.

I’m thinking maybe you should put in frozen corn.

I think so, too.

Did you try making the recipe?

Not yet.

Oh, yeah. Try it both ways and see which one works.

Yeah, and then call us back, okay?

Okay. Thank you so much for your answer.

All right. Take good care. Bye-bye.

1-877-929-9673.

Or send an email to words@waywordradio.org.