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Chris -- 2025-05-10
“Macbeth does murder sleep, the innocent sleep,
Sleep that knits up the ravelled sleave of care,
The death of each day’s life, sore labor’s bath,
Balm of hurt minds, great nature’s second course,
Chief nourisher in life’s feast” (2.2.35-39).
Rereading the above I was seized by an inexplicable impulse to check what I had always assumed to be an archaic spelling of sleeve. The imagery had always worked well for me probably because at primary school many of us had home-knitted jumpers which usually had gibbon-like arms – made to “grow into” though none of us reached the necessary 9 foot in height – which pretty soon became a tangle of spirals dangling to the knee. Perhaps I’d realised that wearing ragged garments may not have been the universal experience I’d once, unthinkingly, taken it to be.
A sleave, I find, is a tangle of yarn or thread, from OE slifan – to separate. A sleeve, on the other hand, is from OE sliefe/sliefan – to put on, and is a piece of clothing which covers the arm.
The ‘sleeve’ version of the second line in the block quote above has 363 unique ghits, with the original scoring only 247 so there is some comfort in not being being a solitary self-dupe.
I should also mention that I’ve always felt that the line called for un-ravelled rather than ravelled, but of course as well as being antonyms, ravel/unravel are also synonyms. Can there be many more such pairs?
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Peter comments:
I should also mention that I’ve always felt that the line called for un-ravelled rather than ravelled, but of course as well as being antonyms, ravel/unravel are also synonyms. Can there be many more such pairs?
I had a collection going of these once, but seem to have misplaced the full list. Still, here are some I have documented in use as having a positive meaning even with the supposedly negative prefix, or a negative meaning even without the expected negative suffix. A few are apparently standard for some: e.g. unthawed, unopen . Some are probably blends (e.g. unopen may well be blended from open and untie .)
unfrayed, unfrazzle, unpeel, unrace, unshovel; de-empty, dethaw, unthawed, unfrosted, unopen, unstraighten, de-fumigate, unyank
I realize that without context this list is less than helpful: maybe later I can find time to give each of these in a context. I do remember that
That was the day I unyanked the television from the wall.
was said with no sign of consciousness that it was an odd way to speak.
.
A related collection would be words like utterable in (an) utterable failure that lack the negative suffix but maintain the meaning from it.
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As for the sleave being ravelled or not: would it not depend on whether the poet is referring to the state of one’s care before or after sleep has had at it? If your nerves are frayed before they are knit up, are they not unfrayed afterwards?
Last edited by DavidTuggy (2010-11-17 06:56:05)
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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Speaking of “unravel,” there are a number of examples on the web of “unraffle” as a replacement of “unravel.” Here’s a sample:
Blogger’s description of a botanical garden: “The quest in the Klaas Voogds Maze … starts with a stone age movie in a stone age cinema after which visitors have to unraffle the mysteries of a cycling Dutchman and a womanising German.”
Is there a semantic link between “unravel” and “unraffle?” They seem antonymical.
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
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How about “flammable” and “inflammable,” which appear to be antonyms, but mean the same thing?
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Is there a semantic link between “unravel†and “unraffle?â€
Perhaps unravelling something imposes some kind of order or clarity, and since a raffle is dependent upon chance, unraffling too involves a retreat from the purely random and a return to some kind of order.
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Two more, blendiferous.
Cutting too deep increases the risk that the cigar wrapper will unwrapple.
http://www.howtodothings.com/video/how-to-cut-a-cigar
Gee wiz, I am confused. Any one cares to unwrapple my mixed up thoughts?
https://service.thrivent.com/mboards/me … tstart=749
was disappointed in the finishing especially around the v-neck – looked like it was ready to unrazzle.
http://reviews.qvc.com/1689/A73325/a733 … htm?page=5
just be sure to finish the edges first so it does not unrazzle so much.
http://www.crossstitchforum.com/viewtop … w=previous
after unrazzling herself from the german pretzels, “tillie says HI EUPH, I LOVE YOU!!”
http://www.jctv.org/discussion-zone/vie … &start=110
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