You misspelled “feel”, woodstockbirdybird. Where’s my prize?
I’m not really going to hit “submit reply”, am I?
You misspelled “feel”, woodstockbirdybird. Where’s my prize?
I’m not really going to hit “submit reply”, am I?
Exactly. Admittedly, it’s easier to tell what’s meant by “disinterested” in context - I guess it’s just a pet peeve of mine. But if you say to me “It was fortuitous that I met you”, unless you throw in a qualifier before the word such as “completely”, I could interpret it two vastly different ways.
Let me ask you, woodee, did you bother to look up disinterested in your holy dictionary?
{QUOTE=Merriam Webster’s New Universal Unabridged Dictionary}
dis.in.ter.est.ed (dis in’ t@ res’ tid, -tri stid), adj. 1. unbiased by personal interest or advantage; not influenced by selfish motives: a disinterested decision by the referee. 2. not interested; indifferent.
[1605-15]; [DIS-1 + INTERESTED].
–USAGE. DISINTERESTED and UNINTERESTED share a confused and confusing history. DISINTERESTED was originally used to mean “not interested, indifferent”; UNINTERESTED in its earliest use meant “impartial.” By various developmental twists, DISINTERESTED is now used in both senses. UNINTERESTED is used mainly in the sense “not interested, indifferent.” It is occasionally used to mean “not having a personal or property interest.”
Many object to the use of DISINTERESTED to mean “not interested, indifferent.” They insist that DISINTERESTED can mean only “impartial”: A disinterested observer is the best judge of behavior. However, both senses are well established in all varieties of English, and the sense intended is almost always clear from the context.
{/QUOTE}
Your claim that only “some dictionaries give a second definition as ‘uninterested’, while pointing out that it’s technically incorrect” is bogus.
And the idea that any word can be “almost universally misused” is ridiculous (literally, as in “worthy of ridicule”). That’s like saying a cup of coffee really costs a quarter, but almost every place you go they charge the wrong price.
You don’t know what you’re talking – sorry, ranting about.
Damn! I knew somebody was going to make me honor my promise.
Tell you what: I’m all out of the figurative variety at the moment, but if you want to arrange a meeting I suppose you could settle for the literal substitute. Although then you’d probably have to change your definition of “prize” (or so I’ve been told) (over and over and over) (but they were just jealous).
Will you folks calm down?! There has been a serious breach of edicate in here!
(read that one on these very boards yesterday. Sigh.)
Why yes, it does. I’m glad you asked.
I’m glad I could clear this up for you. Unless you used the word “actual” when you really meant something else? Something like “inherent”? Or maybe “intrinsic”? How about “absolute”? Do any of these come closer to what you were trying to say?
If that’s the case, then please pay attention to what I’m about to say:
Words. Have. No. Inherent. Meaning.
Understand that and you’ll have a lot less annoyance in your life.
Thanks to people who refuse to treat them as if they do.
Uh, yeah, I did. In fact, I’ve run across the apparently bizarre notion that “uninterested” is the incorrect meaning in a shitload of books on language, many of them recent - like I said, I’m at work now, but I can definitely give you names and cites tonight after I wake up if you’d like (one that springs to mind was Bill Bryson’s recent book of misused/misunderstood words). And please tell me how your finding one source that doesn’t explicitly state that it’s technically incorrect somehow negates my claim that most dictionaries do. OK, I’ll even give you that point, so we’re not nitpicking this to death for eons: most dictionaries I’ve looked it up in do. I’d tell you how I worked at bookstores for 6+ years and often used available dictionaries to give people examples of the meaning of “disinterested”, but I’m sure that’s just anecdotal nonsense and in no way as rigorous as you’d like. Anyway, if you checked out dictionary.com, you’d notice under their usage notes:
In traditional usage, disinterested can only mean “having no stake in an outcome,” as in Since the judge stands to profit from the sale of the company, she cannot be considered a disinterested party in the dispute. But despite critical disapproval, disinterested has come to be widely used by many educated writers to mean “uninterested” or “having lost interest,” as in Since she discovered skiing, she is disinterested in her schoolwork. Oddly enough, “not interested” is the oldest sense of the word, going back to the 17th century. This sense became outmoded in the 18th century but underwent a revival in the first quarter of the early 20th. Despite its resuscitation, this usage is widely considered an error. In a 1988 survey, 89 percent of the Usage Panel rejected the sentence His unwillingness to give five minutes of his time proves that he is disinterested in finding a solution to the problem. This is not a significantly different proportion from the 93 percent who disapproved of the same usage in 1980.
Isn’t this fun? We could go on like this all night! Except you’re already boring the living shit out of me.
And your coffee analogy doesn’t wash - what’s that got to do with the price of oranges in Montana? Saying a cup of coffee costs a quarter etc. etc. would mean I was deluded, since there is verifiable proof that isn’t the case. Saying that most people misuse a word is similarly verifiable by checking the fucking sources for proper definitions - dictionaries, lexicons, essays on usage, studies of linguistics, etc. If you want to write these off as appeals to authority - well, WTF am I supposed to say to that? That these people who’ve studied these things and made them a huge part of their lives should defer to some uninformed jackass that uses “disinterested” to mean “uninterested” because they sound like they mean the same thing to him? Are you telling me that because the majority of people believe something to be true that that’s all that’s necessary to make it true? Man, I seriously don’t get it.
Interestingly, the OED gives the first definition of disinterested as
The earliest cite for disinterested is for this meaning, not the “impartial” one.
No, not thanks to anything, except maybe the nature of language itself.
Well, I didn’t come to argue. You smart people seem to have this discussion well in hand, so I’m going to step out. I’ve got a long drive to California ahead of me.
Oy! The woman that works here in our order department uses that phrase several times per day. She used to work in the bakery at a grocery store and, at 42 years old, this is her first office job. Now, it’s a pretty relaxed atmosphere (we import crap from China and sell it to gift shops), but I’m so used to working in professional environments that I’m not used to hearing someone who use phrases like “no, we don’t got none” and the word “ain’t”, which make me cringe every time. I’ve been here for a year and a half and I’m still not used to it.
And don’t get me started on answering every question with a deep “Uuuuuuhhhhhhh”! She does this at least a couple of dozen times during an 8-hour day. I read a quote recently that saying “Uuuhhh” is the equivalent of putting your finger in your nose.
Oh yeah, my contribution to the thread? Conversate. Not only is it a misused word, I don’t think it’s even a word! My husband uses it when he wants to push my buttons. :mad:
[sub]Here’s hoping that I didn’t misuse any words in this post.[/sub]
Well, nothing has any inherent meaning, does it? Meaning is a human concept, and we apply it as we see fit. But we do attribute specific meanings to specific words - that’s basically the job of words, right? To signify? Well, if a word is used to signify a concept, and a large number of people misunderstand (or, really, just don’t bother to find out) what it signifies, and instead use it to signify a completely different concept, can you not see how the problem is with the people and not the signifier? That’s what I’m saying. And especially when usage is based on uninformed laziness, I see nothing wrong with pointing out the correct definition (according to the “experts”, at least) and informing others that they could be using the word more effectively and actually (yes, actually) sounding like they know what they’re talking about instead of trying to come off that way.
Speaking of “actually”, again, from dictionary.com (third definition):
Based on fact.
Which is slightly different than “existing in fact”, and which I suppose either of us could use to our advantage in our definition of “actually” - whether you consider it to be based on the fact that most usage experts say “uninterested” is incorrect or on the fact that most people use it that way anyway.
Ok, educate me. Why is this wrong? (I’m usually up on all these new-fangled grammar rules…)
It should be said as “how dare they” or “how dare he” or “how dare she.”
What I don’t see is why there is a problem at all. If “a large number of people” understand a word to mean a certain thing, then among those people, the word means that thing. That holds true even if some of those people don’t want that word to mean that thing, like you don’t want “fortuitous” to mean “fortunate”, but you understand it when used that way in context.
What, exactly, are you worried about? A Tower of Babel scene, where people can no longer understand each other, eventually leading to the downfall of civilization? You may as well be pissed that we no longer speak the Ur language. After all, it was just laziness that allowed it to evolve into the thousands of languages that have been spoken throughout history, right? If only some of these jerks had shown a little more discipline, we could all be speaking Proto-Indoeuropean today! :rolleyes:
You have a right to your feelings, woodstockbirdybird, it just seems to me like a random and pointless thing to get annoyed about.
Wups. I’d better watch out. I’ll have to plead mitigating circumstances, since English is my second language, since I got a ticket by Woddy, the language police.
Thank og, the language police was not around before the great vowel change.
And another thing:
I’m sorry, but this strikes me as grasping at straws. “Based on fact” is just the vaguest definition you could find for this word. “Actual” is probably one of those words that used to mean something very precise, but experienced “definition creep” as more and more people started to use it colloquially - or to use your words, ignorantly and lazily. If I apply the same standard to “actual” as you apply to “disinterested”, then the phrase “actual meaning” should denote the meaning of a word at the time it’s said.
Your use of the word “actual” when you really meant something closer to “inherent” or “absolute” is exactly the same as someone saying “disinterested” when they really mean “uninterested”. I’m not criticizing your use of the word, since I and everyone who read the post understood you just fine. I’m saying you’re doing exactly what you’re getting so “het up” about other people doing - participating in the evolution of language!
(I forgot to cite that my definition was from Merriam-Webster)
Are you being ironic, or is “approbation” not what you meant?
What about nauseous vs. nauseated? I think I’m the only one left in the U.S. that uses the original meanings of the words. (Nauseous = causing nausea; nauseated=feeling nausea.)
Language has moved on and left me behind, alas.