: Well yeah, you'd prefer to leave it out of discussion, as
: with many other things you got wrong. :-) Concede the
: point and move on, dude.
Heh.
: Not at all; I was using "unlife" to mean
: "sentient undeath," in the belief that I
: could appropriate the word for my own use because it
: was never used to describe any actual Myth creatures.
: How WRONG I was.
Exactly the meaning I had given the word. I was trying to differentiate between the thoughtless minions (such as Thrall) and the ones which possess sentient thought (such as Shades).
: This whole "Un-" argument doesn't make a whole
: lot of sense. To quote Oxford, "un" is
: "prefixed to express negation, privation, or with
: the sense 'not having.'" "Reversal" is
: hardly a requisite implication.
I tend to agree with Sili here, Oxford is widely acknowledged as the authority on the English language. Of course, everyone's gonna have a different opinion based on the dictionary they're looking at.
This is fresh from the Macquarie Concise Dictionary: A prefix meaning 'not', freely used as an English formative, giving a negative or opposite force, in adjectives (including participial adjectives) and their derivative adverbs and nouns.
OR
A prefix used in English to form verbs expressing a reversal of some action or state, or removal, or deprivation, or release etc.
Don't know how much use this'll be to the debate, but look over it.
: An uneducated person isn't a formerly educated person
: who's had his education taken away; an unmade bed need
: never have been made. Unlife is just the state of
: lacking life; undeath is the state of lacking death.
: For something like a Thrall, neither alive nor dead,
: "Unlife" and "Undeath" are both
: perfectly appropriate terms.
Good point.
: Having stated that, I should probably bail from this
: thread, as the chances of a useful discussion
: continuing off this are close to zero. So let's see if
: I can keep my mouth shut...
Heh, I already said I'd bail from the thread. I lasted a whole three hours. :)
: --SiliconDream
Lord Raven
