There's
a skunk's aroma wafting through many English words
by
Howard Richler
If
a reader peruses
this article should I be A)disinterested
or B)nonplussed?
It totally depends on the meaning abscribed to the three italicized
words. Let me explain.
Traditionally,
“disinterested,” meant impartial but nowadays the vast majority
of people use it to mean “not interested.” I regret this modern
usage because an important distinction is being lost and would hope
that hockey referees are disinterested in the traditional rather
than the new sense. “Nonplussed,” similarly has gone from meaning
“bewildered” to “unfazed.” This was the sense Barack Obama
used the word when he stated last year, “I've been really happy by
how nonplussed they've {his daughters} been” by media scrutiny.
Also, while the original 15th
century meaning of “peruse” was “examine carefully,” by the
16th
century it was often used merely as a synonym for “read.”
This
also asks the question, (please don't resort to begging questions )
how long do we insist that the older meanings should prevail?
Truth be told, there is no
simple answer because there is no definitive arbiter on what
qualifies as proper English. According to Merriam-Webster
Collegiate Dictionary and other American
dictionaries, many new meanings are acceptable. For example, “peruse”
can mean not only to “examine carefully” but to “read over in a
casual manner”; “disinterested” can mean “not interested”
as well as “impartial”; and “enormity” can mean the same as
“enormousness.” On the other hand, some dictionaries and many
learned usage commentators regard these positions as linguistic
heresy.
Lexicographer
Bryan Garner in Garner's
Modern American Usage states
that “when a word undergoes a marked change from one use to another
– a phase that might take ten years or a hundred – it's likely
to be the subject of dispute.” He adds that “a word is most hotly
disputed in the middle of the process: any use of it is likely to
distract some readers.” He characterizes these disputed words as
“skunked” and therefore best avoided. Hence, although there might
be some ancient pedant who believes that “egregious” should
still mean remarkably good as it literally means in Latin, “above
the flock,” the fact remains that it has not been used in a
positive sense since 1845 and will not make the “skunked” list.
The reality, of what
qualifies as a “skunked” word is not as clear-cut as Garner
pretends.
Can
anyone say definitively when a word has been “skunked”? Garner
includes in his list of skunked words, “decimate” and “hopefully”
whereas I, and many others, regard the use of “decimate” to mean
“kill one-tenth” and the exclusive use of “hopefully” to
mean only “in a hopeful manner” and not “one hopes,” or “it
is to be hoped,” to be hopelessly moribund. Some prescriptive
language commentators decry the use of “jejune” to mean
“childish” and point out that change in meaning stemmed from the
mistaken belief that the word stemmed from the French word for
“young” jeune
and
the Latin juvenus.
Notwithstanding this mistaken belief, dictionaries accept “childish”
as one of the meanings of “jejune.” Similarly, some language
purists argue that the word “dilemma'' should only be used to
refer to a choice between two unpleasant alternatives and not a
plight or predicament, but most dictionaries allow for this latter
sense.
Also,
we must acknowledge that some usages that might not be acceptable in
British English are acceptable in North American English. Examples of
such are the verbs “careen” and “aggravate.” The former
(notwithstanding that it should be “career”) is common in North
America English just as using aggravate to mean “annoy” is well
established in both Canada and the USA. Relative to the use of
aggravate to mean “annoy,” Wynford Hicks advises in Quite
Literally,
“Use with care since purists disapprove of the second {annoy}
usage.” The reality, however, is that this usage has been
entrenched in North America for many decades.
In any case, I'm content as
long as you're not disinterested in this article in the modern sense.
