_{Photo by Evgeniy Alyoshin on Unsplash}

The English language is blessed with an abundance of prefixes to express negation. Un-, a-, in-, non-, dis-, mis-, de- give us words such as ‘unhand’, ‘amorphous’, ‘indestructable’, ‘non-conformist’, ‘dissatisfaction’, ‘deconstruction’ and ‘misgivings’.  And there is also one suffix, -less, which acts as a kind of minus sign, subtracting hope from the hopeless, help from the helpless, a soul from the soul-less and the like…

Of these prefixes, un- is especially prolific. It generates so many coinages that the Oxford English Dictionary declines to list them all for fear of creating an anti-dictionary consisting entirely of anti-words beginning with un-.

And, while we are on the subject of anti-, it is also worthy of note that un- differs from its Latin and Greek relatives, in that it is not derived from the Indo-European negative particle like Latinate non- and Greek a(n)- but rather from a Proto-Germanic form of ant(i)- against.

Anti- itself is related in its Indo-European ancestry to the word for ‘in front of:’ ante- as in anteroom and anterior.

Un- thus has a certain antipathetic quality to it, akin to anti-, as if it were butting up against the negated object with its hard-boned forehead.

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Long ago, Old English possessed another negative prefix that has now been almost entirely expunged. This ancient ‘wan-’ prefix, as is evident from its form, was related etymologically to ‘want’ in the sense of ‘lack’, and also to ‘wane’, ‘vain’, ‘waste’, ‘vast’, ‘void’, ‘vacuum’, and ‘vanish’… and by extension to the concept of vanity: wantonness and vaunting.

Sadly, we have now lost: *wanhope, a want of hope that falls short of despair; *wantrust, a want of trust that is neither mis- or distrust; and *wantruth, a lack of veracity that this not exactly fallacious or untrue–untruthiness perhaps would be the contemporary word.   

‘wan’ the adjective, meaning pale (or dark in its original sense), is of uncertain origin. It is tempting, however, to relate it to ‘wane’ and thus to the extinct negative prefix. A ‘wan-thing’ would be a pale shadow of itself. Not nothing. But a thing drained of color, bleached of itself.