Unhouseled and unaneled and unakite and unnilhexium and unnilpentium and unbe and undo and undone

As we move through the "u's," thankfully finally escaping from the tentacular grasp of the "ub's" (though there is still a lot that could be done on ubiquity and its friends), we lithely leap through uhlan, a body of European light calvary modeled on the Tartars, and ululant, a great word to express wailing, and umami, which is not in the OED but appears in the Collegiate, referring to a meaty taste sensation, and umbel, which is a racemose inflorescence (no I won't go into detail now; just look at the sketches of various kinds of inflorescences in the Collegiate s.v.). I really like umbles, which are the edible viscera of animals, especially a deer. When you look up that word you brought into the world of numbles, which are entrails, as well as dowsets, the testicles of deer. There are lots of different spellings of dowset and going down that road can take us pretty far afield. I won't mention umbrage or umbrageous at all because they deserve an entire paragraph or more, and umiak is an open Eskimo boat. Finally, unakite, which is also not in the OED but in the Collegiate, is an igneous rock found in the Unaka mountains of North Carolina and Tennessee. I am embarrassed to say that before today I didn't know about these mountains, despite the fact that more than 70 hiking trails crisscross them. We are all narrow, only in our own fields.

Stayed on "Un"

First, let's dispose of the ecclesiastical terms: unaneled and unhouseled. The former means "without having received extreme unction" and the latter means "not having received the Eucharist before death." Thus, they are from those parts of Catholic doctrine which holds that it is essential for a dying person to have all the help he can get as he takes his journey into the unknown. Shakespeare is kind enough to use both words in the same sentence in Hamlet: "Cut off even in the Blossomes of my Sinne, Unhouzzled, disappointed, unnaneld..." And Byron could write, "Unanel'd he pass'd away...To the last a Renegade." And, an example of the latter is from Scott's Ivanhoe, "Me..they suffer to die like the houseless dog on yonder common, unshriven and unhouseled." To be unshriven means to be in a state of unconfessed or unabsolved sins. Usually if you are unshriven it is because you are unpriested. Enough theology for now.

Let's move to chemistry. I found three consecutive words in the Collegiate, which do not appear in the OED, referring to elements. Unnilhexium is the element Seaborgium (#106); unnilpentium is Dubnium (#105) and unnilquadium is Rutherfordium (#104). According to the table of elements, there are now 109 elements, with Hassium (#108) being the most recently synthesized (1984). Looking at the three words in the Collegiate made me wonder, well, where are unnilquintium and unnilseptium, etc? That is, why would only three of the elements have these names? That is when I discovered that there was an element naming controversy that I was as ignorant of as I was of the existence of the Unaka Mountains in Tennesssee.

Apparently the controversy began in the 1960s and wasn't fully resolved until 1997, and related to what you name an element when there were teams of people who discovered it. Not to go into the controversy at length, the names preferred by the Americans for 104 and 105, for example, were Rutherfordium and Hahnium, while the Russians preferred Kurchatovium for 104 and Nielsbohrium for 105. There is a fascinating brief online article in the Wikipedia on the controversy, to which I refer you for more information. It is interesting, however, that the official names for the three elements are now Seaborgium, Dubnium and Rutherfordium; does that mean that the "unnil"-words have dropped out of the langauge, and only witness to a controversy that has now been solved almost a decade ago? I don't know, but the Cheyenne people could still pull these words out of a hat and make us spell them.

Finishing with some Fun

Hamlet might have said, "To be or not to be, that is the question...", but he never used the word unbe. Unbe, to be distinguished from umbo (which is a knob of boss on a shield), means "to lack being; to be non-existent," even though the OED tells us that this verb is rare. Burton's 1885 translation of the Arabian Nights has "This ecstasy would see my being unbe," and Thomas Hardy, a decade or so later, could write, "But for the charge that blessed things I'd liefer have unbe." Another definition of unbe is "to deprive of being," such as in the sentence, "God..could as easily destroy them, as subdue them, unbee them as conquer them." I think the word ought to have a revival. Instead of verbs like "destroy" or "decapitate" or "kill," why not bring back "unbe"? Its stark simplicity and clarity would bring everything to a screeching halt.

Closely related to unbe is undo and the participial form undone. Surprisingly, the Collegiate only has "not done; not performed or finished" for undone, even though it has "ruin" for undoing. Yet, I want to use the word undone to mean more than something that remains unaccomplished. The OED gives an additional meaning: "brought to decay or ruin; ruined, destroyed," and remarks that the usage was chiefly predicative but the attributive (directly before the noun it modifies) was common in the 17th and 18th centuries. I am sure you historians of language are relieved to discovered that. But here is where we find the meanings that are familiar to us today. "Blaney, a wealthy heir at twenty-one, At twenty-five was ruin'd and undone." And, Charles Dickens could write in Nicholas Nickelby, "I am undone. Whichever way I turn, I am undone."

There is loads more to say about uns, but not today.

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