(v. t.) To recant or recall, as what has been said; to refract; to take back again; to make as if not said.
Example Sentences:
(1) Privatisation would destroy that at a stroke.” Trevor Phillips says the unsayable about race and multiculturalism Read more The government is considering privatisation as one of a number of options for Channel 4, which is commercially run but owned by the state.
(2) And the oath of “believing in freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom from abuse …” would arguably entail, from the prime minister, her cabinet, her party and her Ukip fellow travellers, a rather more rigorous rejection of Islamophobia, so that Muslim women in shopping centres didn’t have to be dragged along the ground by their hijabs in a newly emboldened climate of “saying the unsayable”.
(3) Comedy wants you to say the unsayable; the celebrity industry would rather you didn’t.
(4) Where it was possible at last for Egyptians to stand side by side and say what was previously unsayable.
(5) That No comes from deep within – and he can never unsay it.
(6) Lessing delivers the occasional blast of dry humour, but it is her intellectual honesty, her ability to say the unsayable, which has made her famous.
(7) "Germans would probably do themselves a service by leaving the euro, but this is something that is unsayable in German politics."
(8) Many of these are people with posh names, liberal-baiting sayers of the unsayable – the “unsayable” generally just being routine racism, sexism and idiocy.
(9) For a potential £400,000 he was prepared to say the unsayable.
(10) It can be an interesting exercise to think the otherwise unsayable.
(11) The unsayable always has that strange cliff-edge allure, and quite a few comedians forage their material in no-go areas.
(12) "I like working in an environment of creative confidence and respect – where nothing is unsayable, so long as you find the right way to say it."
(13) One council leader I met dared openly to say the unsayable – there was no initiative on benefit nor incentive to work that could break the cycle of welfare dependency because there was no local worthwhile work.
(14) Mindful of the damage his win-at-all-costs moves had wrought, Netanyahu lost no time trying to unsay what he had said.
(15) His unsayable thing about women is that they [we] all want to be ravished.
(16) There are things you can never unsay, that you cannot say and still remain friends, and that would have been one of them.
(17) Here was a writer who said the unsayable, thought the unthinkable, and fearlessly put it down there, in all its raw emotional and intellectual chaos.
(18) Joan provoked incredulity mixed with a weird kind of rapture, as she said the unsayable – and they doubled over in laughter again and again.
(19) As Ken Clarke did in 1990 when his colleagues ummed and ahed and allowed themselves to be browbeaten by Margaret Thatcher and her praetorian guard, so Purnell has said the previously unsayable - that the prime minister must go.
(20) I was cited everywhere as having said the unsayable: that it is possible for a woman to dislike her children, even to regret having brought them into the world.
Unspeak
Definition:
(v. t.) To retract, as what has been spoken; to recant; to unsay.
Example Sentences:
(1) Mr Hunt, your plans for the health service have revealed a worrying ignorance of the realities of life in the NHS, and your comments about our lack of professionalism and vocation are unspeakably insulting.
(2) It portrays a bad moment in an event full of unspeakable moments.
(3) Jonathan Franzen , no friend to the rapid onward march of technology, has now turned his ire on Twitter, reportedly describing the microblogging site as "unspeakably irritating" at a book reading.
(4) They might be accused of unspeakable crimes, but Mladic's peers are – on paper – a high-calibre bunch, including over the years a president, a prime minister, defence ministers, interior ministers, and army and intelligence chiefs.
(5) As I told them in Dakar, Hissène Habré did unspeakable things to me.
(6) For 15 years, Matthew Shepard’s unspeakably brutal murder on a lonely prairie in Wyoming has been a byword for the very worst of American anti-gay bigotry and a rallying cry for a more tolerant, more inclusive society.
(7) Bateman's unspeakable imaginings are the disease of an imperviously complacent world.
(8) "Any parallel with the affairs of the Berlusconi family is therefore not only inappropriate and incomprehensible but also offensive to the memory of those who were deprived of all rights and, after atrocious and unspeakable suffering, deprived of their lives."
(9) The Garner family and I have always stressed that we do not believe that all police are bad, in fact we have stressed that most police are not bad.” Later the US justice secretary, Eric Holder, condemned what he called an “unspeakable act of barbarism”.
(10) The home office minister, Beverley Hughes, went as far as to brand the programme "unspeakably sick".
(11) At the time of the plaque’s removal , Brian Kwoba, one of the campaigners, said Rhodes was “responsible for all manner of stealing land, massacring tens of thousands of black Africans, imposing a regime of unspeakable labour exploitation in the diamond mines and devising proto-apartheid policies”.
(12) Obviously to do that to anybody is pretty low, but to do that to somebody who trusted you and cared about you is just unspeakable."
(13) March 4, 2016 matt blaze (@mattblaze) Cyber pathogens are so unspeakably dangerous that the open research community has wisely never published a single paper about them.
(14) Facebook Twitter Pinterest Of course their unspeakably obnoxious stage manner was not to everybody’s taste.
(15) Abbott said if it was confirmed the plane was shot down, “that is an unspeakable crime and the perpetrators must be brought to justice”.
(16) Photograph: Supplied In Oscar compound, where the hunger strike started a day later, protesting asylum seekers chanted at the gates: “Freedom, Freedom, Freedom.” The men in Foxtrot held a silent protest at the wire gate of the compound, standing in the rain for two hours in an unspeaking vigil.
(17) The novel opens with Clay's return from New York to Los Angeles, where he quickly becomes embroiled in a Hollywood-noir thriller plot involving threatening texts from unseen stalkers, dark and duplicitous sex, sinister disappearances and the requisite scenes of unspeakable violence.
(18) Even so, the changing circumstances of al-Shabaab's increasing aggression and apparent lack of central command have led to unspeakable violence against Somali and international civilians, and is a question that demands a robust answer.
(19) In her 1963 novel A Summer Birdcage , Margaret Drabble’s narrator Sarah describes a “loathsome flat” in the King’s Road, Chelsea, and an “unspeakably sordid” place in Highgate.
(20) They had suffered what their lawyers describe as "unspeakable acts of brutality" including castration, beatings and severe sexual assaults.