See query.I seem to remember a first time when “he disrespected me” became a thing to say, more precisely, that I first heard it by and when American blacks were…shown, as we used to say…disrespect.
It now is all over the place. It still makes me, for one, twinge a little, but that’s life. (Things get verbed all the time, of course; it was a mainstay of Seinfeld verbal humor.)
What’s the story on the verb?
This OP is a spinoff on a thread about military inter-rank communications, where “disrespect” and the manners of expressing it are serious and defined; my question was whether any judicial codes use that verb at all.
Is it used in other formal situations such as by lawyers and judges? I guess only anecdotal answers can be given, even though I’m sure there are “style books” which are quite seriously enforced in legal communicatin.
I’ve only heard it relatively recently (since the 1990s or so), starting out with black hip-hop culture and spreading from there. Poking around on google though, it looks like disrespect as a verb goes back to at least the 17th century. The hip-hoppers may be responsible for its current popularity, but it’s definitely not new.
“Disrespect” seems OK to me as a verb. If you can respect someone, why can’t you disrespect them, too? And, as has been pointed out, it’s been in use for a few hundred years.
You don’t disrespect people, you don’t Diss them. You show disrespect for another individual. As an added bonus, I can hold nothing contempt for any moron that seriously considers the slang usage proper English. See, we lost control of our own language, the King’s English, and here we are with scads of morons that can’t speak our language. So they just invent stuff. Diss is one of them. Using “disrespect” as a verb is another. That’s ok, bruh, I get it.
Are you the new authority on what constitutes proper English? Where are you getting this “rule” from, given that “disrespect” has been used as a verb for over 400 years, as shown by the OED citations? I guess “we” (whoever that is) lost control of the King’s English sometime before the 17th century.
Huh. I don’t know why I thought this, but it seemed to me the modern use of the verb disrespect referred more to the act of being disrespectful rather than the state of holding someone in disrespect. I guess I’m working backwards from “to dis”. So all those historical citations refer to a state of disrespect rather than the act of disrespecting someone, and that perhaps is the difference betwen slang usage and traditional usage.
D18, I’m not following you. Are you saying that you think the modern use of the verb “disrespect” is normally intransitive? All of the OED citations show the verb used transitively, and that seems to be the modern usage as well.
This is a dictionary from 1886. The word has been used as a verb for a long time and noted as such in dictionaries from the 19th century. So go ahead and feel smug in your contempt for those who use it as a verb. You’re simply wrong about this.
IAN D18 and cannot speak for them, but I think I see what they meant: namely, that the modern usage of “to disrespect” is more likely to refer to an action, while the earlier sense seems to suggest a state of mind. (But the verb is transitive in both cases.) Here’s a made-up example to illustrate what I mean:
“To disrespect”, traditional sense: The rich man contemptuously threw the coins on the counter because he disrespected the shopkeeper’s humble condition.
“To disrespect”, modern sense: The rich man disrespected the humble shopkeeper by contemptuously throwing the coins on the counter.