#1056 Un-understandable

I’ve noted before how our language holds a few traps for the unwary. But lately it seems like our entertainment folks are getting worse at it than ever. Maybe they just ain’t so smart without a script.
The problem comes with the use of the prefixes un, in, non and dis. Usually when you take a word, say, “do” and you put an “un” in front of it, you have the opposite action, “undo”.
But understandable doesn’t take that same route. Who knows what derstandable means. And if it’s not understandable we can’t say its un-understandable. We just use another word altogether.
There’s also the ongoing issue with flammable and inflammable. They mean the same thing. You can flame something or inflame it. If you can’t burn it, it’s non-flammable or even more confusingly, non-inflammable.
But back to entertainers. Not long ago Emma Watson, one of the actors that stars in the Harry Potter flicks, was quoted about how difficult her first on-screen kiss was. She said she wanted it to look right and not rush through it. Her words: “Rupert and I were quite nervous that it might look ingenuous as we were so desperate to get it over with.” Actually ingenuous is not like insincere. Ingenuous means innocent and truthful. Disingenuous means not innocent and untruthful. “Genuous” is not a substitute for genuine. Ingenuous is.
And Jaclyn Smith the other day, one of the supposedly smart angels, was quoted with a similarly egregious error. She was describing Farrah Fawcett’s struggle in the end. And she said Farrah was “unrelentless” in her fight.
Sorry Jaclyn. Check the script. Relentless is what you mean when you’re saying she didn’t give up. She was relentless it her fight. The suffix “less” reverses the meaning of relent, which means to give up. You can be unrelenting and not give up. You can be relentless and not give up. But you can’t be unrelentless and not give up.
It’s like I heard a person recently saying she was going to make dinner so she needed to unthaw the chicken. I ask her if her intent was to freeze it again.
The date was relentlessly chilly from that point...
America, ya gotta love it.