“Unthaw?”
That was the question Dan Anderson asked in a Facebook comment regarding a headline on the front page of the March 22 Boulder Monitor: “Spring sports unthaw.”
“I thaw that, too,” Jeremy Craft chimed in on the thread.
When these comments started coming in I naturally reflected on my word choice. I wrote the headline rather quickly, then looked at the word and asked, “Is that right?” So I took the quickest route I could think of to fact-check and Googled it. Forty-seven thousand results pulled up in 0.38 seconds, with the top one attributed to “Oxford Languages.” According to this source, “unthaw” means “thaw or cause to thaw.” Oxford Languages even used it in a sentence: “The warm weather helped unthaw the rail lines.” (As I write this, I want to point out that every use of “unthaw” is welcomed with a red squiggly line, signifying alarm, by my word processing software.)
Considering that Oxford Languages recognized “unthaw” in the way I’d intended, I took it as a green light and let it fly. Little did I know this would only be the beginning of the debate.
The next day the Boulder Monitor received a not-so-subtle correction in our drop box. A reader – who clearly wished to remain anonymous – dropped off a copy of “thaw” in the dictionary (which dictionary is unclear), with the word circled in red sharpie, along with a comment: “Unthaw is not a word.”
I shared this – along with the dictionary definition I found on Google – with the Facebook thread, and it only led to more confusion:
“Wow,” Anderson responded, “so I guess unthaw is to not thaw, which is also to thaw? And I suppose enthaw would also be to unthaw, or at least to cause to unthaw? My vocabulary is embiggened.”
The confusion didn’t end here. Over the weekend Chuck Catherman sent an email, letting me know “unthaw means to freeze again. Thaw means to remove from a frozen state.” That certainly makes sense to me. Why say unthaw when what you really mean is to thaw? For unthaw to mean “thaw or cause to thaw,” well, doesn’t that just make it an unnecessary word? Perhaps.
So what’s the takeaway here? For me, no matter what Oxford Languages says, I’ve learned the valuable lesson of not using words that may confuse – or, annoy, in some cases – loyal readers of the paper. Speaking of which, thank you to all who shared thoughts on the “unthaw” debacle. I appreciate you holding us accountable and starting this constructive dialogue.
Let’s hope spring arrives soon, and we can finally thaw – or unthaw.
