unmember

present singular third person unmembers · participle present unmembering · participle past unmembered · past unmembered

1. transitiveTo deprive of membership, as for example in a church.

   Ques. Suppose a man does not choose to pay his fine? Ans. Then he is unmembered, and if he goes to see and comes to an accident, he gets no benefit.

   1826, John Beveridge, Evidence in favor of the Seamen, page 15

   4 more examples

   ["Non-confoederate persons, in their sense are "Non members of the Church, &c.] and consequently their children have no title to Baptisme, (which is one of our Authours arguments in pag. 10 of his book, borrow'd from Mr. Hooker, part. 2, p. 24, whereby he unmembers and unchurches all not so constituted.

   1652, Daniel Cawdrey, A sober answer to a serious question propounded by mr. G. Firmin

   Or, that the people have become their enemies and burdens, when they first make and account them enemies, unmember and unchurch them, as very little better then heathens.

   2012, Daniel Cawdrey, C. Matthew McMahon, A Discourse on Church Discipline and Reformation, page 79

   The speaker moves "Into a world where sound shaded the sight" and where he hears "the dull hooves again"; the horsemen, he says, come Again, all but the leader: it was night Mmemntly and I feard: eleven same Jesus-Christers unmembered and unmade, Whose Corpse had died again in dirty shame.

   2016, John V. Glass III, Allen Tate, page 311

   The goal of what follows is to examine this tension in greater detail and with reference to the specific cases of individuals and groups of individuals caught once in a network of risk-induced behavior and then in a world of risk-informed rehabilitation, implying them in a logic designed to reestablish order and ensure survival, in which members of the legal/legitimat national community are dis-membered, rememberd, and unmembered either because of ethnicity, poverty, borders, warfare, or a combination of the four, yet rarely because of their histories, names, or singular lives.

   2019, Maria Boikova Struble, The Politics of Bodies at Risk, page 13

2. raretransitiveTo dismember.

   Who curse the knives That unmembered them .

   1968, El Corno emplumado: The Plumed horn, page 72

   2 more examples

   Beneath thy hand we lie— Unmembered, broken, bleeding hearts, Nor dare to question why.

   1881, Drummond Welburn, Memoir of William Kendrick, page 117

   I says to myself 'You've gone and unmembered this man .'

   1987, David Carkeet, I Been There Before, page 33

plural unmembers

1. A non-member.

   The values that her family and culture held were very important to Lisa, and she fretted over the prospect of becomming an "unmember” of her family, were she to become pregnant outside marriage.

   2010, Jerrold S. Greenberg, Clint E. Bruess, Sarah C. Conklin, Exploring the Dimensions of Human Sexuality

   3 more examples

   Friday evening around 8:30, you'd toil up the rickety stairs at 37 East 8th Street, perhaps stopping off for a chat in James Rosati's studio—halfway up—and watch him work on his bust of Lewitin, who was the domestic Cerberus, with a pale blue eye cocked for unwelcome unmembers.

   1975 January 6, Thomas B. Hess, “When Art Talk was a Fine Art”, in New York Magazine, volume 8, number 1, page 83

   Calcutta the temperature-taker, the dispenser of aspirins, the receiver of Medicaid payments, the unmember of the A.M.A., the husband of a woman who can't read the arrows in parking lots because she can't see over the dashboard because she's so fat from having so many kids paid for by American tax dollars, whispered, "Adam and Eve were Hindus."

   1988, Dallas E. Wiebe, Going to the Mountain, page 18

   Many groups (younger people, the unwaged, the unmembers) will not belong to any organization that might possibly be involved; many of the members of the committee (e.g. clergy) cannot be said to “represent” any constituency, even if they have a valuable contribution to make to consultation.

   2023, Michael Keith, Race, Riots and Policing