Glossary entry (derived from question below)
English term or phrase:
but unamiable
English answer:
that were not unattractive: few traits that were attractive
English term
but unamiable
And this, moreover, was a mother's estimate of the child's disposition. Any other observer might have seen few but unamiable traits, and have given them a far darker coloring.
Thank you!
4 | few traits that were not unattractive: few traits that were attractive | Charles Davis |
4 | few traits which, in contrast, were surly/unfriendly | Mohammad Ali Moinfar (X) |
4 | but unlikeable | David Moore (X) |
Jul 15, 2012 15:57: changed "Kudoz queue" from "In queue" to "Public"
Jul 23, 2012 10:41: Charles Davis Created KOG entry
Responses
few traits that were not unattractive: few traits that were attractive
The main point here is "but", which in this case means "apart from", "except", "besides": its first meaning in Webster's 1828 dictionary.
http://1828.mshaffer.com/d/word/but
So "few but unamiable traits" means "few traits apart from unamiable ones": in other words, nearly all the traits any other observer would have seen in the child were unamiable; there were few to be observed besides those. To any other observer apart from his/her mother, the child would have seemed almost entirely unamiable; most of the traits such an observer would have seen in him/her were unattractive and therefore few (if any) were attractive or pleasant.
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Note added at 17 hrs (2012-07-16 09:12:02 GMT)
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Just to add to what I have replied to David about "unamiable", it is quite true that this word is not listed in moden dictionaries (at least the ones I have looked at), but it was once a recognised word. As I say, it is defined (as "not raising love") in Dr Samuel Johnson's A Dictionary of the English Language, first published in 1755, with eighteenth-century usage examples from Joseph Addison in The Spectator and the poet John Philips.
http://archive.org/stream/dictionaryofengl02johnuoft#page/n9...
Johnson's work was regarded as the pre-eminent English dictionary until the first OED was completed in 1928. So I think his inclusion of "unamiable" is sufficient to establish this as a real word, albeit now archaic. When Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote this passage (from The Scarlet Letter) in the mid-nineteenth century, it was still in use, though it is very rarely found in modern English. But it is certainly not a non-word.
In any case, the meaning of "unamiable" is fairly obvious; the difficulty here is the correct interpretation of "but".
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Note added at 6 days (2012-07-22 15:02:52 GMT)
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By coincidence, I have just come across the word "unamiable" in David Copperfield by Charles Dickens, which I am currently re-reading. The passage refers to the odious Miss Murdstone:
"I do not doubt that she had a choice pleasure in exhibiting what she called her self-command, and her firmness, and her strength of mind, and her common sense, and the whole diabolical catalogue of her unamiable qualities, on such an occasion." (chapter 9)
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