haplology (n.): contraction of a word by omission of one or more similar sounds or syllables (as in mineralogy for hypothetical mineralology or \’prä-blE\ for probably)

This word came up when I was following a tangent into a blog post on over- and under-negation at the Language Log. I’ve been familiar with the phenomenon of overnegation, where in constructing a sentence one adds an unnecessary “not” or other negative particle or affix. It’s common in large part because the reader tends to gloss over it, and because the meaning is changed by way of double negative, which is an intellectual construct easily ignored anyway. Overnegation cropped up in The Comics Curmudgeon‘s discussion of a holiday Hagar the Horrible from last year:

The good folks at Language Log point out that Hagar doesn’t miss not having a 9-5 job. He clearly doesn’t have a 9-5 job now, since he and Lucky Eddie appear to be tromping through the woods in broad daylight (albeit under the cover of industrial smog from all those nasty factories in Viking times). This sort of construction happens all the time.

The point, though, is that apparently there’s a similarly pervasive phenomenon of undernegation. A typical phrase might be, “He had moved in a week earlier, but his boxes lay strewn across the floor, still unpacked.” Well, no, in fact they’re not yet unpacked. Writer Geoff Nunberg’s theory is that writers of phrases like this mean “ununpacked,” which is clumsy but accurate, and that the misuse of “unpacked” represents “an idiosyncratic sort of haplology” whereby “ununpacked” is simply reduced to “unpacked” without altering the meaning of the word. Curiouser and curiouser….