At first glance, what does “unionized” mean to you?
You mean like when employees start a union?
I think the other meaning of “unionized” would be “un-ionized” or maybe “pre-ionized.” Leave “unionized” to the workers.
And a “mole” is a small burrowing mammal…
Misread it as “onionized”. Need coffee apparently!
Make sure it’s unonionized.
“Organized into a union” - although I’d spell it “unionised” and “organised”…
I picked the employees organized into a union. And I have a science background. I’ve seen “unionized” used in the other way before in a set of class notes, and while I could understand it from the context (the atoms were unlikely to be setting up collective bargaining), it was still odd.
I got the idea from a science column by Isaac Asimov I read ages ago. He said how you read the word depends on whether your background is in chemistry or labor relations. I guessed that while the general public doesn’t give much though to ionization, with all the science geeks here we’d get some votes for the chemical meaning. Or could Asimov have been wrong???
But “un-ionized” would properly be spelled with a hyphen so as to distinguish it from “union-ized”, and “union-ization” - the forming of a labor union, the lack of such a union and whether it’s a good or bad thing - is talked about a lot more often in current political discourse than “UN”-ionization would be in chemistry discourse (never mind that most people hardly ever have discourses on physical chemistry). Pretty much whenever anybody talks about “Wal-Mart workers” in my experience, for example.
I mean, even in a chemical discussion the word would be rather rarely used, no? Ionization is a process of (induced) change, adding or removing charge to a gas or something; “un”-ionization would have to be the reversing of a already done ionization. If you wanted to accentuate that something was in its normal physical state before ionization, it’d be a word like “pre-ionization”, though I guess “un-ionized” could be used as a “before state” description if it was already understood that everything being talked about was destined for one-way ionization.
I read it as un-ionized.
And I was even a union member once.
But I’m a science geek first.
Johanna:
I remember Asimov using it in a Black Widowers story.
Nice 
Can you explain to me though how “un-ionized” would come up? I remember the term “ionized” from school long ago, I don’t remember needing the “un-” form of the verb since AFAICR ionization was an imposed process of change on an initial state.
A molecule without net charge
ISTR that it was important when dealing with ammonia, being explicit about whether we were talking about the ionized vs. un-ionized molecules. But that was long ago and far away.
Jimmy Hoffa and minimum wage
But isn’t un-ionized - “a molecule without net charge” - the natural and hence default state*? You could just say “ammonia” vs. “ionized ammonia”. Though like I said, if the discussion was in the context of ionizing ALL of a given sample of ammonia gas, and there was at some point two collections of ionized and not-yet-ionized ammonia, it’d be useful to use a term like “un-ionized”.
*Yes, I know ions occur naturally as well, i.e., in nature without the Hand of Man. But those are still the result of natural processes acting to turn “default” molecules into ionized versions or we wouldn’t be talking about them as ions in the first place, at least that’s my high level recollection of HS chemistry from almost 25 years ago.
hey, all I’m going on is my memory of college & med school stoichiometry, organic chemistry, and molecular cell bio from the 1970’s. The distinction seemed important then. Admittedly the distinction has not been real important in my career activities since that time. Nowadays questions like “How can we stop this bleeding” and “how did that get there” have more relevance.
“Uncircumcised” is another common word like this (and some people now object to it for the same reason).
And “unpasteurised” for milk. If ammonia is regularly ionized, then specifying “un-ionized ammonia” may be necessary sometimes.