Going negative

''IF YOU'RE SPRING CLEANING this weekend, start with your bookshelves or maybe the boxes of books in your basement, still unpacked from the last move," the Calgary Herald advised readers earlier this month.

See the problem in that quote? Hint: It's not about cleaning priorities or Canadian punctuation. You might have hit the same speed bump in a New York Times Magazine story last February: ''It was dark when I slid off the bed, my feet landing on a duffel bag still unpacked from a recent trip." Or in the Globe in January: ''Ensconced in a brownstone on Bay State Road, boxes of books and papers still unpacked from his office move there last summer, the man keeps a low profile these days."

Unpacked, as you may or may not have noticed, does not actually mean ''unpacked" in any of these examples; it means the opposite, ''still not unpacked." Obvious, once you focus on it, and yet the usage slips by editors and readers all the time; the Nexis news database is sprinkled with citations for ''still unpacked" all the way to 1978, when George Allen was fired after six months as coach of the Los Angeles Rams. ''We still have unpacked boxes in the house" from moving in, the shocked coach told the Washington Post.

But unpacked usually stays under the radar; we're unpacking it today thanks to Geoffrey Nunberg, the Stanford linguist and author, most recently, of ''Going Nucular" (due out in paperback next month). Nunberg mentioned the still unpacked usage a couple of weeks ago in a post to the Language Log website (http://www.languagelog.org), where he called it a ''glaring error" glaring, at least, once you've seen the light.

Nunberg called the mistake ''an idiosyncratic sort of haplology, where the form unpacked stands in for ununpacked." Haplology, he explained in reply to my e-mail, is the dropping of one of two adjacent syllables that sound alike: ''An example in English speech would be the pronunciation probly' for probably."' In the case of still unpacked, he says, ''there are really two un's at work, the negative that precedes adjectives and participles (unopened, unready) and the reversative that appears in verbs like untie and unlock. So the form really means ununpacked,' and haplology reduces that to unpacked."

Dropping a syllable from ''probably," however, doesn't change its meaning. But when ununpacked becomes unpacked, the sense is reversed, and we find ourselves saying ''still unpacked" when we mean ''still packed."

But is still unpacked just a sneaky mistake, or should we admit it to the lexicon? That debate continues to bubble along on Language Log and other interested websites. Nunberg thinks it's an error: No matter how often writers misuse ''unpacked," he says, if they see the problem once it's pointed out, and vow to sin no more, we shouldn't be calling it standard usage.

But others, including Jesse Sheidlower of the Oxford English Dictionary, point out that unpacked for ''not unpacked" has a long history, starting with an OED citation from 1721: ''Loads of ill Pictures, and worse Books . . . , lye unpacked and unthought of when they come into the Country." It shows up today in books by the likes of Joyce Carol Oates, Fay Weldon, and Sue Miller; if it's good enough for them (and their editors), its defenders say, it's a legitimate usage.

If it does win a place in the dictionary, unpacked (meaning ''not unpacked") won't be the first nonsensical idiom we've embraced. As H.W. Fowler observed long ago in Modern English Usage, ''Many idioms are seen, if they are tested by grammar or logic, not to say what they are nevertheless well understood to mean." What role exactly does yet play in ''Luyendyk has yet to win a race"? What is but doing in ''I can't help but watch it"?

And negatives are especially tricky. ''It is impossible to underestimate the inspirational value' of Star Trek,"' LeVar Burton said on CNN earlier this month, but listeners would have heard what he really meant, which was ''impossible to overestimate." Then there's ''I could care less," still driving people mad by its synonymy with ''I couldn't care less." (On this subject, too, Language Log is both thorough and entertaining; visitors may not be reconciled to the usage, but they will learn that ''I could care less" is neither so new nor so youth-oriented as many think.)

We may not have the audience of ''American Idol" here, but everyone gets to vote: Should still unpacked, in the sense of ''not unpacked," be sent packing, or is it an idiosyncrasy the language can live with? Go to www.boston.com/ideas to pack the unpacked ballot box.