Note that he took issue with the “modern usages” rather than attacking your person.
Up until the early 1980s disinterested indicated someone who held a view unaffected by personal interest. This would tend to make the disinterested person a bit dispassionate. In recent years, disinterested has come to indicate the meaning originally expressed by uninterested–having having no interest, personal or otherwise, in a topic or discussion.
Perhaps you actually did mean disinterested and Liberal was too quick to express his lament, but your language is a bit ambiguous (as you contrasted disinterested against dispassionate), so I can see what prompted his comment.
(I also mourn the change of meaning of disinterested to become the equivalent of uninterested as I believe we have lost a useful word, but I am weary of the battle and rarely express my sorrow unprompted.)
No worries. I didn’t take it as an attack. However, given that my first exchange on the boards with Liberal was when he took it upon himself to disabuse me of the widely held notion that a “free” good or service was one for which you didn’t have to pay, I was bracing myself for an exercise in pedantic nit-picking.
Now that I look over what I wrote, I have to agree with you that my contrasting of “dispassionate” and “disinterested” was ambiguous. I actually agree with you and Lib about preferring the original meaning of “disinterested”, and that was my intended usage. I should have said “dispassionate” and “disinterested” (although that would be a tad redundant). Oh well. :smack:
Yeah, I got reamed once after starting a Pit thread on the subject. “Language changes! Even if it does so because a bunch of retards start using a certain word incorrectly!” You’ll never win that one here.
Preferably my side. (And preferably cheap.)
(Dropped out first semester.)