"Je vais ou je vas mourir, l'un et l'autre se dit ou se disent." ("I am about to--or I am going to--die; either expression is correct.")
To read about another Frenchman interested in words, whose birth date is today, visit Today in Cynic's Almanac
On this day in 1897, the first copies of Bram Stoker's novel Dracula went on sale in London bookstalls.
Stoker coined the noun un-dead, which he in fact considered as a title for his story. The word had appeared before that in the Oxford English Dictionary, as an adjective.
The Official Scrabble Player's Dictionary considers undead to be a noun. It gives legitimacy to the extremely dumb word unbe, "to cease to have being." Most other dictionaries list unbe as archaic.
It also lists "unlive" as a verb, defining it as "to live so as to make amends for."
Other amusing "un-" verbs in the OSPD:
Unchoke ("to free from choking"); unchurch ("to expel from a church"); unguard ("to leave unprotected"); unmingle; unsell; unswear; and unthink.
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