Prefixes like “in,” “non,” “un,” “dis,” and “im” make words negative, yes? There may be grammatical particulars I am not addressing here, but generally speaking. So you have a positive word like “restrained,” and you add the prefix “un” to get a negative: unrestrained.
Possible. Impossible.
Sane. Insane.
When there’s a negative word or expression—immaculate, for example—but the positive is almost never used, and you choose to use it, you become rather amusing. Or pretentious. Or pretentiously amusing, which can sometimes be good. In any case, you are uncovering a buried word. The neglected positive of immaculate is maculate, meaning morally blemished or stained. The neglected positive of insufferable is sufferable—meaning bearable—though no one ever uses it.
Other times, the neglected positive is not a word. It is then an imaginary neglected positive, or INP (inpea).
(Frankie made up everything that follows after the stuff about maculate and sufferable, just in case you thought of impressing your English teacher with your knowledge of the inpea.)
Some inpeas: Impetuous means hotheaded, unthinking, impulsive. The positive of it doesn’t exist, so you can make a new, illegitimate word.
Petuous, meaning careful.
Ept, meaning competent, from inept.
Turbed, meaning relaxed and comfortable, from disturbed.
You can make more inpeas by pretending that something is a negative when it’s not a negative—because, you justify, it has one of those prefixy-sounding things at the beginning.
Impugn—it means to call into question, to attack with words. It comes from Latin in- (against) plus pugnare (to fight). Pugn by itself—although there is no such word—should technically mean to fight, like to fistfight. But to the ardent neglected positivist, to pugn would be to speak well of something.
Yet another technique of the neglected positivist is to impose a new meaning on a word that exists but, through the convolutions of grammar, doesn’t technically mean what you are deciding it means. The neglected positive of incriminate is criminate, which actually, technically means the same thing as incriminate—because the in- isn’t really making a negative in this case—but it is much more amusing if you use it to mean the opposite. Criminate: to give someone an alibi.
When you redefine a word like this, you are making a false neglected positive, as opposed to an imaginary neglected positive, and it can be useful to term these falsies FNPs or finnips. But falsie is more entertaining, so Frankie went with that. Later, when she thought all this through.
Transcribed by me from pages 110–112 of my hardback copy of The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks (a novel), © 2008, Hyperion Books.
Tweet: When you use a neglected positive, you are uncovering a buried word.
Tweet: Wordplay isn’t pretentious—it’s fun.
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