Unconceivable.
You keep saying that word. I don’t think it means what you think it means.
Unlock-able versus un-lockable
That’s mental bracketing for you.
TIL the thing I do when I’m trying to understand an ambiguous sentence has a name
Unlockable ass-lock
Ahh, I’ve been speaking english for over a decade, and I still sometimes get caught up with these and say the opposite thing of what I want
Like the whole thing of flammable and inflammable meaning the same thing… just why?
“flammable” actually has an interesting story:
Since 1980s use of the word, especially in safety warnings, has been sometimes discouraged lest it be misunderstood as “non-flammable” through confusion of the two prefixes in-.
So which is sanctioned…?
Merriam-Webster says this:
“When cooking over a gas stove, avoid wearing loose, (flammable/inflammable) clothing that could catch fire easily.” Which word is correct: flammable or inflammable?
It’s a trick question. Both flammable and inflammable are correct, as they both mean “capable of being easily ignited and of burning quickly.” This makes no sense to the Modern English speaker. In English, we think of in- as a prefix that means “not”: inactive means “not active,” inconclusive means “not conclusive,” inconsiderate means “not considerate.” Therefore, inflammable should mean “not flammable.”
[…]
What do you do? If you want to keep things crystal clear, choose flammable when you are referring to something that catches fire and burns easily, and use the relatively recent nonflammable when referring to something that doesn’t catch fire and burn easily. Inflammable is just likely to enflame confusion.
Personally I use “inflammable”, but if I were writing warning posters I would have to reconsider that.
Personally I use “inflammable”
I also like to reduce the likelihood of being understood.
Inflammable is just likely to enflame confusion
:-)
Cuz the prefix “in-” can mean both “not” (as in invalid) and “to cause to be” (as in indebted)
But why?
Yes.
Romantic words were incorporated differently into other languages as the Roman Empire’s influence spread. Words like inflammable have more direct Latin roots than words like indebt. So where Inflammable comes directy from the latin inflammo, indebt came from old French and middle English, going from something like endetter and endetten, using the root word dete and dette, but stemming from the root Latin word, debitum. Then en became in at some point.
That’s how I understood it anyway through a very short amount of google searching. Anyone feel free to correct me.
Because modern English is a combination of ancient Celtic languages with the various languages of the British Isles’s numerous populators and conquering forces across history, including but not limited to: Latin, German, Norse, and French. And spelling wasn’t really standardized until the printing press was invented, due in part to class stratification. But that’s another story lol. Suffice it to say, it’s more than a bit of a hodgepodge and you just gotta take it for what it is.
What words come from Celtic languages? I thought it was all Germanic with Latin and French words being borrowed later.
You won’t be too surprised by some of them actually: bog, bourbon, druid, shamrock, corgi, whiskey, crumpet. Others you’ll find here have more circuitous routes where maybe just one phoneme stems from old Gaelic or something, into Latin, into Germanic or Old French, then into Old English, like “ambassador.” I’m guessing most of the really Celtic words are used in the British Isles more than elsewhere in the English-speaking world.
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In French you can say ininflammable
Also “off” meaning both off and on
The alarm went off (the alarm started) The light went off (the light suddenly stopped producing light)
Went off really just means everything :3. “Wow you really went off on that guy” = yelled at someone, “the milk went off” = spoiled, “we went off on an adventure” = left to travel and so on
Latin
Should have been enflammable
Let me present to you a genre-classic from Germany:
umFAHREN -> to drive around something or somebody.
UMfahren -> to drive against something or somebody in a way it/they fall over.
making up the rules as we go
You seem unaware at how, while French is steered by a committee of linguists, English is steered by a mob of autofellatic influencerati fame-whores, all looking for differentiation and trends to manufacture. So fetch.
The Académie Française is absolutely not a “committee of linguists”. They’re a bunch of rich conservatives who are way too high on nationalism, and they are infamous for going against the consensus of linguists (who they supposedly consult).
Stop trying to make fetch happen.
Psh, English is like half French, and prescriptivism is bad linguistics.
At the end, both are the same.
You end up with something that isn’t locked.
I want my front door to be unlock-able, I don’t want it to be un-lockable.
Depends on emphasis. Said with normal stress on the first syllable is “able to be unlocked”.
But if you pronounce it with extra emphasis on both of the first two syllables with a bit of a pause between, I think most people would think “not able to be locked”. Very context dependent though
Redminds of the German “umfahren” (run over) which is the exact opposit of “umfahren” (drive around). (First is pronounced with a tiny pause after the second letter; the other is not.)
When you say that something is easily unlockable the second way sounds clunky, but both convey the same message that whatever it is, it is not secure
Are we just making up language rules as we go?
Yes, throughout history, in fact.
And to answer the meme’s question it can have either definition based on the context of usage.
could be both
maybe it’s a homonym
The issue is the fact that the opposite action of locking is called unlocking and not something like delocking.
I would never use that word in either context, neither one is coherent. I would say, Picard, where is Beverly Crusher! She must shackle me, before I am overcome!
Both. It is already been locked and therefore cannot be “locked”; simultaneously because it is locked, it is able to be unlocked.
