Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- transitive verb To retract (something spoken); unsay.
from The Century Dictionary.
- To recant; retract, as what has been spoken; unsay.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- transitive verb rare To retract, as what has been spoken; to recant; to unsay.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- verb rare To
retract what one hasspoken , tounsay .
Etymologies
Sorry, no etymologies found.
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Examples
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How does corporate unspeak from Scottsdale, Arizona get embedded in the procedural manuals of the Mounted Police?
hughstimson.org » Blog Archive » The Epistemology of Tasers, Revisited 2009
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Her dark eyes are eloquent with unspeak -able wistfulness, and her countenance is clouded with something very like regret.
Archive 2009-01-01 Hels 2009
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Her dark eyes are eloquent with unspeak -able wistfulness, and her countenance is clouded with something very like regret.
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I agree that the committee should just have used 'a proper sanction ', rather than' not an improper sanction ', but that's committee-speak (unspeak) for you.
Churchill, Horowitz, Plagiarism, and Academic Freedom Richard Nokes 2006
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But if that process leads to unspeak, as Poole shows that it often does, then it does as much damage to the foundations of honest society as unspeak in the hands of the right.
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Poole, a British journalist, does nothing to hide his anger and contempt for the practitioners of “unspeak” and his style is often caustic, dry, and viscous.
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Spite of all that, I might refuse to unspeak my words, which
Mary Anerley Richard Doddridge 2004
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It stitl wasn't right; she wished she'd been able to find better words to explain why she had overreacted, and nothing she could say would unspeak some of the hurtful things she'd said.
Arrow's Fall Lackey, Mercedes 1988
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It stitl wasn't right; she wished she'd been able to find better words to explain why she had overreacted, and nothing she could say would unspeak some of the hurtful things she'd said.
Arrow's Fall Lackey, Mercedes 1988
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Many of the graves were sunken, from others grew sturdy pines, whose roots had committed unspeak - able sin.
Can Such Things Be Bierce, Ambrose, 1842-1914? 1909
vanishedone commented on the word unspeak
Slate: 'Unspeak, writer Steven Poole's term for a phrase or word that contains a whole unspoken political argument, deserves a place in every journalist's daily vocabulary. Such gems of unspeak, such as pro-choice and pro-life, writes Poole in the opening pages in his book Unspeak: How Words Become Weapons, How Weapons Become a Message, and How That Message Becomes Reality, represent an attempt to say something without saying it, without getting into an argument and so having to justify itself. At the same time, it tries to unspeak—in the sense of erasing, or silencing—any possible opposing point of view, by laying a claim right at the start to only one choice of looking at a problem.'
January 18, 2008
uselessness commented on the word unspeak
Fascinating.
See also: propaganda.
January 18, 2008