“Why? What did I do?”

She was laughing too hard to be taken aback. “What do you mean?” Snort.

“If I was too funny, then I wasn’t just the right amount of funny. When did I cross the line?”

Her hysterics subsided. “I’m not sure.” She instinctively reached for his hand.

“I simply showed you the comic, which I thought was simply funny, and then reiterated that I like the man in the last panel would be thinking about how the bear might defend himself from…”

She interrupted. “Don’t, you’ll kill it,” she said, her face drawing down into a pout.

“But I thought I did kill it; I went too far.” He very nearly looked her full in the face.

“Now you have.” She actively avoided his stare.

“So I hadn’t before?”

“I was laughing my fool head off!”

“But you said I was too funny.”

“God!” she blasphemed loudly enough for other passengers to hear. “Did you not catch the emphasis you just repeated back to me? You’re too funny doesn’t mean you’re excessively funny, just that I find you very funny.” She lightly punched him in the should; he was oblivious to it. He was too busy thinking.

“Oh,” he said after a while. “I think I blew it.”

“Yes.” She was looking straight ahead. “Yes you did.”

“I suppose now isn’t the time to talk about marriage then.”

“I suppose not,” she said. “I thought we were going to have a nice discussion about it.”

“On a bus? Because I showed you a comic strip?”

“Why on earth must you always do this?”

“Do what?”

“One minute you’re hilarious and then you’re still huggable but then you’re still so serious about everything it just… you eat moments like zombies eat brains.”

“Unthinkingly?”

She burst out laughing and whacked his chest with her purse.

In the case of zombies, the term “undead” is used to refer to them as a collective whole, as a race or species. “Nondead” is less appropriate, for while it would convey the fact that zombies are far more ambulatory than the normative deceased, it fails to convey that the zombies were once dead; or, if it does convey that, it does so with much less force.

(Another example of this connotation, although one based in marketing rather than in organic etymology, holds for “uncola”; 7up has always been a carbonated sweet water, and therefore a cola, although it subverts the usual formulae for what is deemed as cola, and in so doing is perceived [due to intensive advertising more than anything] as having progressed from a state of being cola to a state of being beyond cola.)

The utility of the “un-” prefix used in this manner cannot be overstated. For clearly, the undead, while no longer deceased, also are no longer living. The simple addition of this prefix drums up a word for a third state of being.