Not insane. Unsane.

loup-vaillant

Edit :Excellent suggestions in the comments. Two of them stood out for me:

"Untaught" may be better. It is less connoted (if at all), conveys about the right meaning, and can be understood by about anyone (thanks, shminux).
Using a word to name a category can raise walls around it. In this case, we must be extra careful not to stigmatize the very people we'd like to join us (thanks, daenerys).

We often use "insane" to describe people whose behaviour or beliefs are below the sanity waterline. But as most must would agree here, you cannot call someone insane with a straight face just because he happens to believe in magic.

I'm currently watching Future by Design, a documentary featuring Jacque Fresco and the Venus Project. Jacque came up with this word, "unsane", to describe people who basically, aren't rational because they haven't been exposed to the right ideas yet. Which would be different from "insane", which is more about irrevocably irrational people.

I like this word, because there isn't the tone of accusation we find in "insane". This neutrality makes it easier to say that we can do something about it. Insanity should be eradicated like vermin. Unsanty on the other hand can be fixed.

So, do you think this word, "Unsanity" might be worth using?

Edit :Excellent suggestions in the comments. Two of them stood out for me:

"Untaught" may be better. It is less connoted (if at all), conveys about the right meaning, and can be understood by about anyone (thanks, shminux).
Using a word to name a category can raise walls around it. In this case, we must be extra careful not to stigmatize the very people we'd like to join us (thanks, daenerys).

So, do you think this word, "Unsanity" might be worth using?

Nonsane would be better, I think. Whereas unsane suggests a strongly opposite to sane, nonsane suggests a mere lack of sanity. It also looks like it might be related to nonsense, which is a common product of nonsanity.

Nonsane would be better, I think. Whereas unsane suggests a strongly opposite to sane, nonsane suggests a mere lack of sanity.

I'm shocked that this ended up in an extreme upward spiral. "Strongly opposite" doesn't seem to be the suggestion at all. We have an actual word (insane) that means that and the fact that someone has clearly gone out of their way to use insane is an overwhelmingly strong indication that they are not trying to say "strongly opposite to sane!"

The difference between "non-X" and "unX" tends to ... (read more)

11EphemeralNight14y

I also like nonsane better, for those reasons and because I would predict that using unsane in conversations with persons considered to be so, is more likely to provoke Logical Rudeness and dismissal in the form of "it's pronounced 'insane', idiot", than nonsane is likely to. Nonsane is a clearly-separate term. Unsane pattern-matches to Ralph Wiggum.

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Not insane. Unsane.

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Not insane. Unsane.

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