Definitions
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
- v. Obsolete To retract (something spoken); unsay.
Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- To recant; retract, as what has been spoken; unsay.
Wiktionary
GNU Webster's 1913
- v. rare To retract, as what has been spoken; to recant; to unsay.
Examples
“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
“Her dark eyes are eloquent with unspeak -able wistfulness, and her countenance is clouded with something very like regret.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Spite of all that, I might refuse to unspeak my words, which”
“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.”
“Many of the graves were sunken, from others grew sturdy pines, whose roots had committed unspeak - able sin.”
“Spite of all that, I might refuse to unspeak my words, which I never did afore, if it had not been that I wronged the man.”
“As the New York Times explains, it is rather a gruesome bit of unspeak for a surgical procedure in which a dog's vocal cords are cut.”
Lists
These user-created lists contain the word ‘unspeak’.
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Politrix
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
vexillology, blowback, impunity, extraterritoriality, plenipotentiary, filibuster, pundit, jingoistic, gerrymander, swiftboat, espionage, ipsedixitism and 151 more...
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VanishedOne's Words
facipulator, fetiphobia, gules, boustrophedon, reverse boustroph..., unreal, ensiform, xiphoid, romhack, heritage, floccinaucinihili..., johnian and 1004 more...
Tweets
Looking for tweets for unspeak.
uselessness Fascinating.
See also: propaganda. Jan 17, 2008
vanishedone 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.' Jan 17, 2008