When you add the prefix "un" to a word, you are saying more than you would by preceding the word with "not." "Un" implies a value judgment, that the resultant word is less desirable than the root word. The only exception to that is a long-ago advertising campaign by 7-Up, which proclaimed it to be the "uncola."
Unclean. Unhealthy. Unemployed. Uneducated. Unmarried. Unfed.
What brought this on was hearing the word "unchurched." That refers to people (like me) who get along just fine by not spending one morning a week in a large hall, offering up prayers to to the locally-preferred variant of the FSM. They seem to be offended that people like me are more than happy to sleep in on the day of rest, and then get up and read the papers while enjoying a hot cup of joe (while they get up early, get dressed in good clothes, and go offer prayers to the Unseen One).
And we're the ones who are to be pitied? We're not the ones who are praying before a statute of some pitiful guy being tortured to death. We're not the ones who have unleashed violence upon neighbors because they believe differently. It was not the "unchurched" who coined the phrase "kill them all, God will know His own."
Unchurched. And proud of it.
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2 comments:
No worries -- I know you checked my blog, I'm not offended -- just way, way depressed at the state of our world these days.
It's pretty damn grim lately!
How come no one ever uses the word necessarily? They only use unnecessarily... poor necessarily...
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