This would be more like un-stained glass than stained glass.
This would be more like un-stained glass than stained glass.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. The movie debuted at the height of turtlemania in 1990 and became the highest grossing independent film ever at the time. It’s also a genuinely good movie.
The other historians have never had any friends so they can’t relate to close platonic relationships.
Fun fact: while a much more often occurrence than once in a lifetime, “Thursday the 20th” is tied with “Saturday the 20th” as the least-likely combination of days of the week with the 20th day of the month, even though you’d think the chances would be exactly 1/7.
Here’s the math about the Gregorian calendar that explains why. (Even though the post is about Friday the 13th, it straightforwardly can be applied to any other day/date combination as well.)
Great question! The answer is that, well, you don’t, but that’s not what I’m intending unstained to mean here.
As it turns out, “unstained” is structurally ambiguous, because English has two different “un-” prefixes, each of which has different functions and different category selection requirements.
The first attaches to verbs, and means “reverse the action of”, e.g. un-tie, un-do, un-stain, etc. The second attaches to adjectives, and means “not X”, e.g. un-happy, un-satisfied, etc.
So, if we want to form the word “undoable”, we can either take the verb “do” and attach “-able” first, giving us an adjective “doable” to which we can then add “un-” to give us “undoable”, an adjective meaning “not able to be done” (“Flying by flapping your arms is undoable”)
OR
We can take “do” and add the other “un-” first, giving us a verb “undo” meaning “to reverse the action of something” to which we can then add the suffix “-able”, giving us “undoable”, a different adjective meaning “able to be undone” (“Simple knots are easily undoable”)
So, while both of these look and sound like the same word, they actually have different structures that correspond to the differences in their meanings.
In my OP, you read “unstained” as “unstain-ed”, with “un-” attaching to “stain” to give a verb “unstain” meaning “to reverse the staining of”, and then added the participle suffix, while my intended structure was to attach “stain” and “-ed” first, giving a participle (adjective) “stained”, to which we can then add the other prefix “un-”, giving “un-stained” “not stained”.