The word “blueprint” is dying out at the professional level and being replaced by the word “drawing,” which is now universally the term of art in pretty much any business. It’s kind of a shame, really. I hope “blueprint” holds on a little.
“Blueprint” is still used in a metaphorical sense to mean “plan.” When I search the New York Times for the word I come up with the following:
I think this meaning is a lot more common than the original one. I hope it stays in the language long past the day when most people know what an actual blueprint is.
Because nobody was using the word theist for about 100 years after the word atheist was being used. If are are no recorded uses of a word, can you really say it’s a word?
There is a word anitpodes, but does that mean that when that word was created there was automatically the word *podes *created? Well, no, because there is no such word as podes.
I think you are conflating the existence of a concept and the existence of a word. A word exists if people use it to express the concept. Agnatha is a (technical) word for a clade within Chordata. Whereas *Gnatha is (so far as I’m aware), not a word, technical or otherwise. Just as (per x-ray vision) *communicado is not a word in English.
There’s a Wikipedia article, as always…
Also -
https://pocketbookuk.com/2014/02/26/words-that-ought-to-have-opposites-but-dont/
And the timeline is semantically plausible, of course. Historically, a belief in some kind of god was pretty much universal, so a word “theist” to group all believers into a semantic category “non-atheists” might not have been useful (later, of course, theist took on a meaning more specific than non-atheist). The word atheist described a notable feature at the time, so it seems quite plausible that it came into use first.
Well, I’d grant you that atheist was more commonly used before theist…
That might be because podes like you don’t know it.
(“If you can’t spot the pode at the poder table, then you’re the pode.” – Babraham Maslow)
Thank for that. The word I wanted to use as an example was nonchalant and it wasn’t coming to me.
Hmm. I seem to be coming up with a lot of controversial facts here. 
(Paraphyletic, in fact. Not that it’s relevant to the topic at hand, but I’m a biologist, so I should get these things right. Maybe it is somewhat relevant, since it explains why *Gnatha is not a phylogenetically useful word.)
I am such a dolent man,
I eptly work each day;
My acts are all becilic,
I’ve just ane things to say.
My nerves are strung, my hair is kempt,
I’m gusting and I’m span:
I look with dain on everyone
And am a pudent man.
I travel cognito and make
A delible impression:
I overcome a slight chalance,
With gruntled self-possession.
My dignation would be great
If I should digent be:
I trust my vagance will bring
An astrous life for me.
― Attributed to J. H. Parker (19th century)
The “unpaired words” article in Wikipedia includes an item worthy of the thread, I think:
“Prepone” is apparently a word in Indian English (the opposite of postpone).
Yes, I’ve heard Indians who live here use that word many times. I often tell them, in a good-natured way, that it’s not standard here, and they’re always very surprised by that.
which would be exactly the same problem you’d have with Atheist. Whatever come after the “A” (or “un”) surely must be an understood or defined concept?
That’s a borrowed word and yes the word “communicado” is a real word, it has to be otherwise the “in” part makes no sense.
the definition is irrelevant. If the construction is using “a” as a greek-style prefix to mean “not” or “without” then whatever follows it has to represent what it is “not” or “without”.
It is a greek word is it not? and podes is the greek plural for feet.
Podes: a point on a sphere 360 degrees from another point on the sphere.
No. You said this:
If I coin the word unspaffable, and claim that it means a substance that cannot be spaffed, In order for the word to have meaning I have, necessarily, at the very same instant, created the word spaffable.
How is coining a word and defining it as “a substance that cannot be spaffed” helpful to anyone when spaffed is not a word?
Atheism became a word on it’s own borrowing from the French athéisme. No problem as with the your coining and defining of unspaffable.
What English dictionary has communicado in it? It has to be? Does chalant have to be a word?
We’re not talking about representing; we’re talking about the order of existence of words. Again, atheism came from the French athéisme, not from adding a to an existing English word.
Again, a concept is not a word.
How many of the honest true facts listed here are actually true?
This thread reminds me of the Peanuts cartoon where Lucy was impressing Linus with her repertoire of “little know facts”, such as the fact cows have to be brought in from the fields each day, lest they get “pasturized”. When Charlie Brown asked her how, if these facts were so little known, did she know them, she replied, “I make 'em up.”
In the case of atheist, the negation intended by the “a-” prefix is not of “theist,” a person who believes in god, but of “the[os],” god. An atheist is an athe[os]-ist, not an a-theist. Understanding what that meant before the word “theist” came into use some time later only required understanding the Greek root theos, not the meaning of the non-existent word “theist.”
Here’s a similar case. Starting in the early 1600s, the word “inflammable” meant “capable of being easily ignited and of burning quickly,” and yet the word “flammable” (paradoxically meaning the same thing) did not come into being for another 200 years.
Cite.
Sigh. But at least it was not an egg before Carroll.
Please don’t tell me Thomas Jefferson’s sheep didn’t kill anyone. I get too much mileage with that in Charlottesville for it to be false.