Horrible Words by Rebecca Gowers

Author:Rebecca Gowers
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2016-02-05T05:00:00+00:00

15

Negatives; Opposites

disinterested, outro

In the opening statement of Paradise Lost, Milton chooses to emphasise, not wrong, so much as failure-to-do-right: his great work will speak, ‘Of man’s first disobedience …’. And Walter Chalmers Smith, in his hymnal of 1867, similarly opts to use several opposites, or ‘antonyms’, in an attempt to approach the subject of divinity: ‘Immortal, invisible, God only wise, / In light inaccessible hid from our eyes …’. In both cases, implicit comparisons—with being obedient, mortal, visible, accessible—are generated through the use of negative prefixes, here dis-, im- and in-.*

There are other rhetorical effects to be wrung from negatives. They can, for instance, be comic. Shakespeare treads a risky line with the humour of Sonnet 130. He starts, ‘My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun; / Coral is far more red than her lips’ red’, and then continues with many further comparisons in the same vein. It is therefore something of a relief to the reader when he ends: ‘And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare / As any she belied with false compare’. In his 1823 revision of Francis Grose’s Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, Pierce Egan details a less high-flown example of calculated reversal. The word bender, he says, is ‘ironical’: ‘if one asks another to do any act which the latter considers unreasonable or impracticable, he replies, O, yes, I’ll do it—Bender; meaning, by the addition of the last word, that, in fact, he will do no such thing’. A couple of centuries later, the same trick would be used, to serenely puerile effect, in the film Wayne’s World, the delayed terminal interjection in this case being not. Though the consequent fad for the last-minute not may have annoyed gripers at the time, this use of not was far from being new. Indeed, the OED traces it back through multiple examples to George Eliot’s Mill on the Floss: ‘Did she feel as he did? He hoped she did—not’.

If one were to give this subject next to no thought at all, it might seem fair to assume that, just as bender was once used to turn a statement into its own opposite, so our negative prefixes—dis-, im-, in-, non-, de-, un-, ig-, ab-, and more—exist simply in order that an amenable word can be made to mean its own reverse: thus dis- makes disagreeable from agreeable, de- and un- make defreeze and unfreeze from freeze, and so on. Put another way, though it might now be hard to work out why unashamed came into the language in 1600, or unserious a few decades later, when these words were wanted, they were easy enough to create.

But as ever with English, a straightforward picture is more than likely to be misleading. For a start, and odd as this may at first appear, negative constructions are perfectly capable of changing meaning over time. The words invaluable and priceless, sixteenth-century coinages, both now mean, broadly, ‘of incalculable worth’. Yet both for spells in their histories were also used to mean ‘of no worth at all’, which is to say ‘worthless’.

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