Is “unserious” a word?

English is rife with words that sprang into existence by a legal, logical process without having been vetted by a dictionary editor. I have never encountered “unserious” before Kamala Harris’s acceptance speech, but it is well formed and readily understandable.

I’d say it’s a legitimate word now, and being used by others as such. Evidence of that is how readily it’s being adopted. Apparently we can recognize it as different from “nonserious” by a shade of meaning, and therefore it fills a tiny but real gap in the language.

Looking forward to seeing what @Demosthenes has to say about it.

I am an editor by profession.

I agree with @Jeruba.

I just asked one of my editors and she said she’s heard it being used recently, “but no, it’s not technically a word.” She went on to say, “neither is a lot of stuff that shows up even in the newspapers these days.”

She pointed out how language evolves (which jellies have discussed many times) but also how she still really enjoys listening to people who use proper standard English. She used different terms that I don’t remember now, but that was the basic message.

She’s immersed in foreign languages most of the day, so she of course sees the pliability of language.

I think there are different ways languages evolve and unserious sounds uneducated to me, like from a dialect or just not knowing. That doesn’t mean my ear is correct, I’m only saying how it sounds to me. That’s why I was curious if maybe it is used regularly in some region of the US.

That’s different than English evolving by adding foreign words to the language or shortening words.

Very interesting to see the word suddenly become normal and spoken by others on TV. Just one other person so far that I have seen. Let’s see how common it gets.

I would say that unserious is a valid word, yes. According to the OED, it is first attested in the 17th century (I do not know the context of this first usage, but my guess is it was not the insult it usually is today). A word like “unserious” is unlikely to be a recent development given how productive of an affix “un-” is. It can be appended to almost any adjective. Not all combinations of “un+ [ADJ]” will be accepted, however, and “unserious” does not appear in some dictionaries.

I have observed that its usage has risen in popularity in recent years and is used mainly as a pejorative against politicians. In that sense, it’s effectively a buzzword. That said, I have also heard it used positively, when a lack of seriousness is seen as refreshing.

Dang. Should have looked in my OED.

So, I’m thinking maybe California is using it more than most places maybe? Since the CA jellies have heard it more than once being used.

I just googled to see if articles from periodicals come up using the word, and some did in the last few years. I thought to do it, because everyone answering that they have heard it being used are very well read people.

If I suddenly start to hear it a lot on TV, it will either mean to me that likely those people also hadn’t heard it before or Democratic talking point now.

I bet if we could search fluther it has never been written here ever before.

I’ve never heard unserious used, seriously. It reminds me of the word/non-word “funner” which I have heard in movies and tv commercials. I cringe every time I hear it, but apparently it’s a thing.

Cambridge

Out of curiosity I asked ChatGPT to give me literary quotations in which the word unserious appears and this is what it came up with.

• James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time:
• “To be committed is to be in danger. In this case, the danger, in the first place, is being thought as unserious.”
• W.H. Auden, The Dyer’s Hand:
• “To fail to use one’s imagination is to betray the possibility of one’s self. To be unserious is to abandon one’s humanity.”
• Richard Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life:
• “It is a kind of unseriousness in people who wish to see themselves as serious, a refusal to deal with the dark realities of life.”
• Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation and Other Essays:
• “The unseriousness of our culture is reflected in the lack of earnest conversation about art; it is instead approached as a form of entertainment, devoid of deeper significance.”
• George Orwell, The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters of George Orwell:
• “An unserious attitude towards truth is the first step towards barbarism.”
• Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale:
• “It is unserious to speak of freedom when the word itself has been stripped of all meaning.”
• Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures on Russian Literature:
• “The unseriousness with which we approach the past reflects our refusal to engage with its complexities.”

I can’t vouch for the validity of these quotes but they sound plausible.

Like @Demosthenes said, “unserious” goes back to 1655. I was able to find it in the Oxford, Cambridge, Merriam-Webster, and Collins English Dictionaries. I’m actually surprised this is a question because the word is used all the time in academic writing, and @flutherother‘s list contains a number of literary works that use it (in addition to the academic works that it mentions). I also remember my grandparents repeatedly referring to a particular person as “fundamentally unserious” when growing up. And since my family is all on the East Coast, it can’t just be a West Coast regionalism.

@JLeslie “I bet if we could search fluther it has never been written here ever before.”

This is the oldest instance I was able to find. I found a few others, but not many.

^^Thank you! How did you get the search to work?

Well, I’ve been in California for 47 years (not the same thing as being a Californian), and I said I’d never heard it. I’m sure it’s not a regionalism, @JL. But it does seem as if I must have read it before and didn’t take note, perhaps just because it did seem so naturally constructed.

Did I think Kamala Harris invented it? Not at all. It didn’t seem to me to need explaining.

@Jeruba Good points and I agree.

Maybe I’m just old and it is being more used by younger people or in academia. You and I don’t remember hearing or seeing it before, so I think it is safe to say we rarely have come across it.

It feels like lots of “new” words are being used and created lately. I don’t know if it is happening at a faster speed than 40 years ago or I’m just out of the loop more now.

I think it was you who pointed out folks or folx (I don’t remember the spelling) being used on a vocabulary list issued by Columbia University School of Social Work. It seems to me especially in the social work and psych realm that there is a lot of new vocabulary or new usage to keep up. I could go off on a tangent about my frustration with it, but I’ll refrain since it doesn’t apply to the word unserious.

@JLeslie “How did you get the search to work?”

Mods have partial access to the site’s database. It’s slow, and there are a lot of limits on the sort of inquiries we can make, which means it’s nowhere near as useful as a working search function. But finding answers that contain a particular word is one of the things we can do.