Redminds of the German “umfahren” (run over) which is the exact opposit of “umfahren” (drive around). (First is pronounced with a tiny pause after the second letter; the other is not.)
You are able to undo the locking. It’s almost like reading comprehension is shit nowadays.
Why can it not mean unable to be locked?
could be both
maybe it’s a homonym
I’m pretty sure one of those has a hyphen
Depends on emphasis. Said with normal stress on the first syllable is “able to be unlocked”.
But if you pronounce it with extra emphasis on both of the first two syllables with a bit of a pause between, I think most people would think “not able to be locked”. Very context dependent though
Highly illockable
At the end, both are the same.
You end up with something that isn’t locked.
I want my front door to be unlock-able, I don’t want it to be un-lockable.
The first one isn’t locked unless you unlock it.
making up the rules as we go
You seem unaware at how, while French is steered by a committee of linguists, English is steered by a mob of autofellatic influencerati fame-whores, all looking for differentiation and trends to manufacture. So fetch.
Stop trying to make fetch happen.
Psh, English is like half French, and prescriptivism is bad linguistics.
The Académie Française is absolutely not a “committee of linguists”. They’re a bunch of rich conservatives who are way too high on nationalism, and they are infamous for going against the consensus of linguists (who they supposedly consult).
I would never use that word in either context, neither one is coherent. I would say, Picard, where is Beverly Crusher! She must shackle me, before I am overcome!
I would say “non-lockable” means can’t be locked, and “unlockable” means can be changed from locked to unlocked, implying also being lockable.
But to answer the question, yes we are making up language as we go along. For one thing we’ve always done that, but recently the trend has accelerated as people strive to reduce complex ideas to simple, overgeneralized slang to avoid having to think as much or do as much thumb-typing.
Let me present to you a genre-classic from Germany:
umFAHREN -> to drive around something or somebody.
UMfahren -> to drive against something or somebody in a way it/they fall over.
It is the same in Dutch: omvaren can mean both sailing around and sailing over.
Unconceivable.
You keep saying that word. I don’t think it means what you think it means.
Both. It is already been locked and therefore cannot be “locked”; simultaneously because it is locked, it is able to be unlocked.
Unlock-able versus un-lockable
That’s mental bracketing for you.
TIL the thing I do when I’m trying to understand an ambiguous sentence has a name
Unlockable ass-lock
Is that ass on lock for being unlockable, or is that lock ass for being unlockable?
