>I had an interesting conversation with my 14 year old last week. She was doing something (don't remember what exactly) silly and rather goofy and I commented "That's very unbecoming." She looked over at me and stated, 'I have no idea what that means. How can you unbecome something you've become?' Imagine my shock (my jaw actually dropped) to discover that my very intelligent straight A student did not know the meaning of 'unbecoming.' Yet, if you are not a native speaker (which she obviously is even though she is growing up in the South :o) her question makes sense.

In most of the languages there's always more history than logic, and I think even more so in English. I've noticed that my kids had, while learning to speak, applied analogies wherever they could, to try to understand (*) what we're saying, or how to say something. In most Slavic languages that's easy - there's pretty much a suffix or prefix for anything, and most of the time you can guess the meaning from the root and the --fix. In English, however, there are such incongruent pairs that just don't make sense. The become - unbecome is one where I really had to grind my gears to understand. I've once posted a list here of all the verbs I could find where prefix re- doesn't mean reversion nor repetition (tire - retire and such).


(*) Cne thing I still don't understand is why the proper English phrase isn't "try to {verb}" but ""try AND {verb}". Try what and {verb}? Doesn't go under my cap.