Dust vs. Undust?
Hire the world's top talent on demand or became one of them at Toptal: https://topt.al/25cXVn
and get $2,000 discount on your first invoice
--------------------------------------------------
Take control of your privacy with Proton's trusted, Swiss-based, secure services.
Choose what you need and safeguard your digital life:
Mail: https://go.getproton.me/SH1CU
VPN: https://go.getproton.me/SH1DI
Password Manager: https://go.getproton.me/SH1DJ
Drive: https://go.getproton.me/SH1CT
Music by Eric Matyas
https://www.soundimage.org
Track title: Over a Mysterious Island
--
Chapters
00:00 Dust Vs. Undust?
01:57 Accepted Answer Score 20
02:55 Thank you
--
Full question
https://english.stackexchange.com/questi...
--
Content licensed under CC BY-SA
https://meta.stackexchange.com/help/lice...
--
Tags
#meaning #etymology #verbs #prefixes #negativeprefixes
#avk47
ACCEPTED ANSWER
Score 20
Undust is used so little that you should indeed see it as obsolete. That ngram shows some results is not really relevant if you compare it with the occurences of dust.
Your paranoia is uncalled for, there is really no proficient, let alone native, speaker of English that will think that dusting your keyboard is similar to watering your plants.
I can understand where your hesitation to use it comes from, as you seem to be saying to opposite of what you are doing. Actually, to complicate matters, dust is used in the sense of adding dust as well: lightly dust the cake form with flour.
In context, however, there will usually be absolutely no confusion. When you dust your keyboard, everyone will understand that you are cleaning it.
As to the logic behind one word meaning two different (opposite) things, we are talking about English, the language that uses words like inflammable, and in which people say I could care less when they mean the opposite. Don't get stuck too much on logic when it comes to natural language!