The word "unabashed" bugs me - sort of - in the same way that "uncanny" does. We know from the "un" at the beginning that these words mean not something. But not what?

"Not abashed," of course, but we hardly ever see "abashed" unmodified - maybe once for every 15 or more times that unabashed is used, by my guesswork.

And "not canny," of course - but while I see and hear "uncanny" all the time, the only time I ever remember using "canny" is in singing along to the Scottish folk song "Jock Stewart," a character who describes himself as "a canny gaun man." (Yep, I sometimes sing words without paying any attention to whether I agree with their meaning. In fact, I do so pretty often, and not just in hymn-singing.)

I'd have been happy to leave it at that, but I recently noticed "unabashed" being used loosely. That happens a lot. Writers want to imply that their subject is somehow brave or highly principled for doing whatever it is that they do, so they stick the word into sentences like "he was an unabashed admirer of .... (insert: Southern cooking, the Yankees, Eliot's poetry, Dean Koontz's books, the music of Lawrence Welk, what have you)." None of these affections, even "what have you," should require anybody to overcome embarrassment (though discretion might lead you to keep quiet about fondness for the Yankees anywhere north of New Haven). As for politicians who are sometimes described as unabashedly taking credit for this or that, who are we kidding?

I still could have left it at that - so what if unabashed is used loosely; most readers are equipped to see through the artifice - but a day or two later I heard someone being described as "bashful." We know from the "ful" at the end that the word means full of something. The shy person can't be full of the same bash that friend Larry Kessler (unabashed admirer of the Red Sox) prays that Big Papi will start doing to the ball once again, nor of the "bash" that a beatnik would enjoy when the bongo drums, poetry and hookahs were brought out. Is the "bash" that the shy person's full of the same "bash" at the core of "abashed," un or otherwise? To rein in a too long story: Yes.

From online sources I learn that back before Chaucer's time, when April brought "shoures soote," somebody wanted a word to describe someone standing with mouth agape. In the French-influenced English of the time, the word "esbair" was cobbled together from ex and baer to mean open wide or gape. This evolved into the middle English "abaishen" and then into the modern "abash" and its "bashful" cousin.

So unabashed people are close-mouthed, while abashed and bashful ones have mouths agape? Not that I've noticed, but once upon a time...

MARK FLANAGAN (mflanagan@thesunchronicle.com) is Opinion Page editor of The Sun Chronicle. He can be reached at 508-236-0335.