Discussion:
Is unintimate a valid word?
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c***@gmail.com
2006-04-12 11:57:40 UTC
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Is unintimate a valid word? Can I use it anyway since it seems easily
understandable?
CyberCypher
2006-04-12 12:32:30 UTC
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Post by c***@gmail.com
Is unintimate a valid word? Can I use it anyway since it seems easily
understandable?
Main Entry:unintimate
Function:adjective

: not intimate; often : distant or shy in social relationships

Sure, you can use it. The question is whether it's the best word for the
context in which you want to put it.

"They have a significantly unintimate relationship, is what I heard,"
said the professor spewing gossip over the back fence.

But it's not an elegant adjective and doesn't fit all contexts.

"The sterile atmosphere in the club made every conversation at every
table seem as unintimate as what the management laughingly called
'personal service'."

"He's a most unintimate fellow, able to talk only about the insects he's
always spotting in the computers he manages, which is why he has no
friends of any stripe," the zoologist quipped.

"We had a typical unintimate conversation: precipitation, provenance,
providence, and propitiation, but nothing about procreation," she said to
her best friend of the priest assigned to preach to her about the proper
birds and bees.
--
Franke: EFL teacher and medical editor
Posting from Taiwan
It's all in the way you say it, innit?
Mike Lyle
2006-04-12 13:57:32 UTC
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Post by c***@gmail.com
Is unintimate a valid word? Can I use it anyway since it seems easily
understandable?
"Unintimate" may be a coinage on your part, but it works perfectly well.
Ugly, though.
--
Mike.
u***@yahoo.com
2006-04-12 14:01:17 UTC
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Post by c***@gmail.com
Is unintimate a valid word? Can I use it anyway since it seems easily
understandable?
Why would you want to do that? there are better words. Give us the
context.
Don Phillipson
2006-04-12 14:59:56 UTC
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Post by c***@gmail.com
Is unintimate a valid word? Can I use it anyway since it seems easily
understandable?
Parsing helps here. The word is presumably formed
by prefix un- and -intimate. But
-- unintimate (adjective) is in the dictionary
-- unintimate (verb) is not in the dictionary. The reason
is obvious: intimate is a verb like tell, and we do not
have verbs untell, uninform, etc. (Unsay seems different,
approved by ancient usage.)
--
Don Phillipson
Carlsbad Springs
(Ottawa, Canada)
Martin Ambuhl
2006-04-12 18:26:38 UTC
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Post by c***@gmail.com
Is unintimate a valid word? Can I use it anyway since it seems easily
understandable?
It is a normal result of standard ways of building English words by
adding affixes to other words. That is the reason that it appears in
many dictionaries in lists made with the prefix "un-". The SOED, for
example, has under the headword "un-" the simple entry
"• un'intimate /adjective/ E20. "
The expectation is that you know how to find the meanings of "un-" and
"intimate".

Such lists are necessarily incomplete, since they are always expanding.
MW11CD, for example, doesn't have "unintimate."
Many dictionaries have dropped such lists, for two reasons: they are out
of date as soon as written, and they really serve no explanatory
purpose. Such dictionaries list a smaller set of words which may hold
some surprise, perhaps a tiny surprise, in store. These lists, where
they exist, are made of words that really don't deserve their own
headword for just the reason you state: they are easily understood.
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