Word suggestion Jan. 7 Challenge

[anonsi]

Unsee. I like the definition from Urban Dictionary best, though I see it's in Wiktionary and Meriam-Webster as well (it could also be in others).

Adj. Used to describe an object so horrific that it becomes seared into your retinas such that it can never be forgotten.

It's popular on sites like Buzzfeed. For example, "21 Things You Will Never Be Able To Unsee".

[birdy]

Adj. Used to describe an object so horrific that it becomes seared into your retinas such that it can never be forgotten.

Aargh!  Don't know that i could trust that definition inasmuch as they think "unsee" is an adjective.

On the other hand, I will agree that "unsee" has not been unseen not only in Buzzfeed, but also in my usual genre/trash reading.

[anonsi]

Haha! Good point, Birdy. 

[Alan W]

The Wiktionary definition is accompanied by usage examples (click on the "Quotations" link at the end of the definition to see them) from a surprisingly long history. For example, George Bernard Shaw in 1897:

I have only seen the performance once; and I would not unsee it again if I could; but none the less I am a broken man after it.

So I think the word ought to be allowed, and for the sake of consistency, the past tense unsaw. Unseen and unseeing are already allowed, for their use as adjectives.

Unsee is an unusual word, in that it seems to be almost always used negatively: something that isn't done, or cannot be done.

[birdy]

I can't think of a way "unsaw" could be used.  Unsawed, yes, referring to lumber. 

Can anyone think of an example?

[Alan W]

There are examples of unsaw in Google Book Search. From a 2001 book called Maps of Women's Goings and Stayings, by Rela Mazali:

And we actively unsaw, or saw as quaintly picturesque and part-of-nature, the stone houses of Arab communities we never thought of then as Palestinian.

Or in David Ireland's 1971 novel The Unknown Industrial Prisoner:

When he caught up, Slug, looking at a distant imaginary prospect of further promotion, said to the Samurai while the faceless one unsaw them both, ...

Definitely not a common word, but a word nevertheless.

[birdy]

Thanks - the first example makes more sense to me than the second.