Word Worries

My father Brad is fairly recently retired after an estimable career in the legal world.  Yes, he has heard every lawyer joke you know.  But it turns out that lawyers, like doctors, IT folks, investment bankers, plumbers, and English teachers (and so on…) also hear a lot of unsolicited questions about their otherwise paid advice.  Many are the football games I’ve spent with him where someone he casually knows has segued a seemingly normal conversation into something like “So I was putting together my will the other day…”.

Anyway, turnabout IS fair play, so the other day when he asked me one of those kinds of questions I was happy to help…except that I was at a loss.  At first I thought I knew the answer, but quickly realized I had no idea.  His question was “why do some words use ‘in’ and some words use ‘un’ to mean the same thing?”  At first I just launched into “well, that’s because…” and then I got stuck.  Why is it “invisible” and not “unvisible”?  Why does the word “intrained” rather than “untrained” not even seem possible (and it isn’t—it’s non-existent, to add another prefix into the mix).  

It turns out that the answer is another one of those pieces of evidence that English is a frustrating mess of a language, and furthermore that the “rules” that govern it can be inconsistent, unpredictable, incoherent, and unruly—though not uninteresting.

A word that gets at the reason is the word “heuristic,” which is derived from a Greek word that means “to find.”  A heuristic is a way of finding a solution to a problem through applying a loose, but pragmatic series of tests.  In other words, it’s a fancy way of describing a trial and error method.  At the University of Idaho, they only required one math course for humanities majors, and during my time it was called “The Spirit of Math,” which sounds very lofty but could have been called “Math for the Hopeless.”  As I recall, all of our topics were related to hourly wage based fields, and involved figuring out the quickest delivery routes for pizza or price per unit costs for t-shirt silk screening.  

The concept of the heuristic is to start the process by bluntly working toward a solution through a “not fully optimized or perfect” set of steps, according to Websters.  And this gets us back to “in” and “un.”  The answer to which one to use requires the application of a heuristic, but one based on imperfect (not “un” or “in” -perfect) information.  As it turns out, “un” is applied to root words that come from Germanic origins, while “in” applies to words that come from Latin origins.  This is obviously not a perfect system in many ways.  The first problem is that if you already know which language origin applies to, say, “transigent,” then you probably already know that the companion word is “intransigent” and that “untransigent” isn’t a word—perish the thought!

So, all you need now is a keen sense of word origins, or a dictionary to look up etymology.  But wait—over time most people haven’t had those things, so how have they solved this problem?  Why, by making things up or forcing the issue, as pizza delivery and tee shirt makers have always done.  That’s why there are a lot of words that have recorded uses of both prefixes.  “Insubstantial” and “unsubtantial” both get their own, redundant entries in most dictionaries.

Since we can’t have that, a second heuristic step can be applied, which is even less useful than the first: if a word comes from an adjectival phrase or a participle, it  usually takes an “un”; if the word comes from a noun phrase, it might be an “in”…unless it’s a “new” word, in which case it might take an “un”…unless the practical phonology (sound) makes it hard to say, and then it could be “in”…unless it’s “non”!  And so on.  That’s the mess of heuristics, and the mess of English’s piled on history of language families and evolutionary changes over time.  

The real answer here is to just look the word up, or ask Siri.  That’s what my dad does!

Word of the Week: nonplussed

We’ll keep this short.  “Nonplussed” is one of those words that has been used incorrectly so many times that now the incorrect meaning has its own entry.  The same thing happened to “literally,” which is a cherished word of those of us who value order in the universe.  It means “literally.”  Usage, especially among Gen Z (sorry, but it’s true) content creators on Youtube, has added the meaning “not literally” to its definition.  I don’t want to get wound up, so I’ll leave it there.

“Nonplussed” isn’t as provocative, but it has a similar evolution.  In 2025, the majority of people I hear use this term use it to mean “unbothered” (not “inbothered”—“bother” is actually an Irish word, so all bets are off).  But it doesn’t mean that.  It’s from a latin phrase “non plus” that mean “no more” or “no further.”  The intended meaning is “a state of perplexity or confusion from which further progress is not possible.”  So, to be “nonplussed” is not to be “unbothered,” it’s to be “unsure of how to proceed, and incapable of making sense of the moment.”  

It’s literally the opposite.