I’m pretty sure one of those has a hyphen
Depends on emphasis. Said with normal stress on the first syllable is “able to be unlocked”.
But if you pronounce it with extra emphasis on both of the first two syllables with a bit of a pause between, I think most people would think “not able to be locked”. Very context dependent though
Highly illockable
At the end, both are the same.
You end up with something that isn’t locked.
I want my front door to be unlock-able, I don’t want it to be un-lockable.
The first one isn’t locked unless you unlock it.
I would never use that word in either context, neither one is coherent. I would say, Picard, where is Beverly Crusher! She must shackle me, before I am overcome!
I would say “non-lockable” means can’t be locked, and “unlockable” means can be changed from locked to unlocked, implying also being lockable.
But to answer the question, yes we are making up language as we go along. For one thing we’ve always done that, but recently the trend has accelerated as people strive to reduce complex ideas to simple, overgeneralized slang to avoid having to think as much or do as much thumb-typing.
making up the rules as we go
You seem unaware at how, while French is steered by a committee of linguists, English is steered by a mob of autofellatic influencerati fame-whores, all looking for differentiation and trends to manufacture. So fetch.
Psh, English is like half French, and prescriptivism is bad linguistics.
Stop trying to make fetch happen.
The Académie Française is absolutely not a “committee of linguists”. They’re a bunch of rich conservatives who are way too high on nationalism, and they are infamous for going against the consensus of linguists (who they supposedly consult).
Let me present to you a genre-classic from Germany:
umFAHREN -> to drive around something or somebody.
UMfahren -> to drive against something or somebody in a way it/they fall over.
It’s the same thing with “unsweet,” which has apparently become the universal term at food establishments when you want unsweetened tea. I’m in the American South, so I encounter this constantly.
But what the hell is “unsweet”? What does that even mean? Did they sweeten it and then somehow take the sweetness back out? Was it accomplished through evaporation? Reverse osmosis? Some sort of industrial-scale anti-sugar process?
“Unsweet” isn’t a word.
So when I order, I specifically say, “unsweetened tea,” and the server inevitably responds, “Unsweet?”
“Gotcha.”
No. You got nothing. I said unsweetened.
Words are often shortened. It reduces the number of vowels and makes communication quicker and easier. Do you also have an issue with these?:
math
gym
bike
fridge
TV
ad
lab
info
photoThere is a lot of unsense out there these days. I saw “unsweet” on my favorite cold brewed coffee.
Both. It is already been locked and therefore cannot be “locked”; simultaneously because it is locked, it is able to be unlocked.
Unconceivable.
You keep saying that word. I don’t think it means what you think it means.
Yes!
Unlock-able versus un-lockable
That’s mental bracketing for you.
TIL the thing I do when I’m trying to understand an ambiguous sentence has a name
Unlockable ass-lock
Is that ass on lock for being unlockable, or is that lock ass for being unlockable?
Ahh, I’ve been speaking english for over a decade, and I still sometimes get caught up with these and say the opposite thing of what I want
Like the whole thing of flammable and inflammable meaning the same thing… just why?
Also “off” meaning both off and on
The alarm went off (the alarm started) The light went off (the light suddenly stopped producing light)
Went off really just means everything :3. “Wow you really went off on that guy” = yelled at someone, “the milk went off” = spoiled, “we went off on an adventure” = left to travel and so on
I went off my head reading this
“flammable” actually has an interesting story:
Since 1980s use of the word, especially in safety warnings, has been sometimes discouraged lest it be misunderstood as “non-flammable” through confusion of the two prefixes in-.
So which is sanctioned…?
Merriam-Webster says this:
“When cooking over a gas stove, avoid wearing loose, (flammable/inflammable) clothing that could catch fire easily.” Which word is correct: flammable or inflammable?
It’s a trick question. Both flammable and inflammable are correct, as they both mean “capable of being easily ignited and of burning quickly.” This makes no sense to the Modern English speaker. In English, we think of in- as a prefix that means “not”: inactive means “not active,” inconclusive means “not conclusive,” inconsiderate means “not considerate.” Therefore, inflammable should mean “not flammable.”
[…]
What do you do? If you want to keep things crystal clear, choose flammable when you are referring to something that catches fire and burns easily, and use the relatively recent nonflammable when referring to something that doesn’t catch fire and burn easily. Inflammable is just likely to enflame confusion.
Personally I use “inflammable”, but if I were writing warning posters I would have to reconsider that.
Inflammable is just likely to enflame confusion
:-)
Personally I use “inflammable”
I also like to reduce the likelihood of being understood.
Cuz the prefix “in-” can mean both “not” (as in invalid) and “to cause to be” (as in indebted)
In French you can say ininflammable
Also in Italian: infiammabile
But why?
Because modern English is a combination of ancient Celtic languages with the various languages of the British Isles’s numerous populators and conquering forces across history, including but not limited to: Latin, German, Norse, and French. And spelling wasn’t really standardized until the printing press was invented, due in part to class stratification. But that’s another story lol. Suffice it to say, it’s more than a bit of a hodgepodge and you just gotta take it for what it is.
Yes.
Romantic words were incorporated differently into other languages as the Roman Empire’s influence spread. Words like inflammable have more direct Latin roots than words like indebt. So where Inflammable comes directy from the latin inflammo, indebt came from old French and middle English, going from something like endetter and endetten, using the root word dete and dette, but stemming from the root Latin word, debitum. Then en became in at some point.
That’s how I understood it anyway through a very short amount of google searching. Anyone feel free to correct me.
Where the words come from. Remember: English is many languages in a trench coat, not really its own set of hard rules.
Hell, even languages with hard rules like Japanese have some exceptions even without the modern trend of borrowing words from other languages!
Should have been enflammable
Cause the verb is inflame and means to place a flame in on on something, as opposed to not flame. The problem being in both inflammable and the issue the OP of the image is the notion of re-bracketing. Rather than think of it as [inflame]able it gets converted into in[flammable] in the minds of new readers/listeners which flips the in- prefix meaning to not rather than in/on like it is supposed to be.
Latin
Bah! Latin. Always making everything more difficult than it needs to be
