=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= EDline Vol. 7, no. 83 (19 March 2002) Editorial mailing list (digest version) Published by the Electric Editors =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Contents: Q & A [2td] Imply / infer [Offshoot of [2ta] "Disinterested" and "masterful"] =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= ---[2]-- Q & A -------------------------------------------------- ** [2td] Imply / infer [Offshoot of [2ta] "Disinterested" and "masterful"] Date: Wed, 13 March 2002 From: Jane Kerr, bywater@ntlworld.com Simon Cauchi wrote: > I can't see any ambiguity at all in the sample sentence ['Uncle > Bill was disinterested and fell asleep during the proceedings'] John Crane wrote: > I would have a serious stumble on that sentence trying to > figure out the connection between "disinterested" and "fell > asleep." > > If, as a reader, I'm supposed to stop at that point and figure > out from the context that the writer really meant that Uncle > Bill was bored and thus feel asleep, rather than being > impartial and having had a poor night's rest... Well, dammit, > that's just poor writing. Agreed. It would be better - because totally unambiguous - if it said "Bill was uninterested" or "Bill was bored". The problem with disinterested, it seems to me, is that if someone is disinterested in the sense of being impartial, we generally think that's a good thing, i.e. we *expect* our judges etc. to be disinterested. On the other hand, if we use the word to mean "uninterested", that normally has negative connotations, so the result is strange illogicalities: Bill's disinterested - oh, good - he's impartial, he'll listen to all the evidence then make up his own mind. Oops, *now* he's fallen asleep. What's going on here? A disinterested friend may well have your best interests at heart; an uninterested one would not. -------------------------- Date: Thurs, 14 March 2002 From: Esther Shchory, odelias@bezeqint.net John Crane wrote: > If, as a reader, I'm supposed to stop at that point and figure > out from the context that the writer really meant that Uncle > Bill was bored and thus feel asleep, rather than being > impartial and having had a poor night's rest... Well, dammit, > that's just poor writing. I heartily agree. I find many modern writers difficult to read because of such misuses. -------------------------- Date: Thurs, 14 March 2002 From: Nick Hudson, hudson@c031.aone.net.au For what it is worth, when I wrote the item that started this I intended 'disinterested' in the impartial sense. My point was that IF it was ambiguous and IF the correct meaning was important, it was a good idea to change the word even if it was being used 'correctly'. The fact that all respondents assumed that 'bored' was intended illustrates the point. The usage was precise in theory yet ambiguous in practice. Incidentally, I also take the point that the 'new' meaning of 'gender' is old (as are most of the other examples), and that it fills a void. But the 'new' meaning is abused or even lost if the word is used as a euphemism for sex. Toilets are designated by sex, not gender, as some male cross dressers found when they were thrown out of the ladies toilets by some butch lesbians at a recent conference. So I still think 'toilets for both genders', coming from an English teacher, was a bit odd. ------------------------ Date: Fri, 15 March 2002 From: Chuck Brandstater, acreatyv1@earthlink.net John Crane wrote in part: > supposed to stop at that point and figure out from the context > that the writer really meant that Uncle Bill was bored That is now a secondary meaning and it was the original one; it has always been a perfectly legitimate one. Inferring the logical meaning from the context should be the easy course; "being impartial and having had a poor night's rest" is such an illogical interpretation, momentarily adopting it and then going through mental hoops just to discover the actual meaning to be just what logic dictates cannot (it seems to me) be a path that many readers will take. > Well, dammit, that's just poor writing. I disagree. It is just a word with a secondary meaning, which it shares with another word; that does not mean that it should never be used when its secondary meaning is meant. Like the use of "imply" or "masterful" or "which" (the restrictive one, I mean) with a secondary meaning, the use of "disinterested" for "bored" is not an error, not a misuse, not an illiteracy, not a barbarism; it is a perfectly fine style decision. ------------------------ Date: Fri, 15 March 2002 From: John Crane, jcrane8@bellsouth.net Chuck Brandstater wrote: > ... "being impartial and having had a poor night's rest" is > such an illogical interpretation, momentarily adopting it and > then going through mental hoops just to discover the actual > meaning to be just what logic dictates cannot (it seems to me) > be a path that many readers will take. You're serious, aren't you? -- that an educated reader should assume that "disinterested" means "uninterested" and that reading it as meaning "impartial" is illogical. I'm flabbergasted. I suppose it would be of no use to ask why "uninterested" wasn't used to begin with. Is "disinterested" more attractive because it's a longer word? Incidentally, the usage note in the American Heritage Dictionary reports that 89 percent of its* panel disapprove of the use of "disinterested" to mean "uninterested." * Or "it's" if you prefer what an increasing number of people seem to be writing. ------------------------ Date: Fri, 15 March 2002 From: Chuck Brandstater, acreatyv1@earthlink.net The context of a specific disagreement is the meanings of "disinterested" not in isolation but in a hypothetical reference to "being impartial and having had a poor night's rest"; John asks me ... > You're serious, aren't you? -- that an educated reader should > assume that "disinterested" means "uninterested" That it may, and in this context does, mean what "uninterested" now usually means. I am serious. > and that reading it as meaning "impartial" is illogical in this context. Of course I am not saying that it would be illogical to infer without context that it, or any word, would likely take its primary meaning if placed in some context. > I'm flabbergasted. That would require a misreading (for my contribution to which I apologize) of my meaning, which is not the stuff that the shaking of the earth is made of (nor of which the shaking ... made). > I suppose it would be of no use to ask why "uninterested" > wasn't used to begin with. Don't ask me. (FWIW I would be inclined to change it.) > Incidentally, the usage note in the American Heritage > Dictionary reports that 89 percent of its* panel disapprove of > the use of "disinterested" to mean "uninterested." And the other 11 percent either approve or are on the fence (but they are no slouches). Clearly, per AHD, it is not clearly wrong (so I might not change it). > * Or "it's" if you prefer what an increasing number of people > seem to be writing. Don't bite people? Sorry, I digress (digest?). I'm not included in that increasing number (except in jest or when extremely, but extremely, exhausted), but I would be in fairly good company if I were. ------------------------ Date: Fri, 15 March 2002 From: Simon Cauchi, cauchi@wave.co.nz The sample sentence, remember, was this: 'Uncle Bill was disinterested and fell asleep during the proceedings.' Nick Hudson (who composed the sentence as an example of ambiguity) has since told us that "disinterested" here was meant to convey the meaning "impartial" but it could be understood in the other sense. He succeeded in demonstrating the word's ambiguity better than he expected: we have all -- except John Crane -- interpreted it to mean "uninterested" or "bored". We did so because we know that "uninterested" or "bored" is one of the current meanings of the word "disinterested", and because when the word occurs in close association with "fell asleep" that is much the more likely intended meaning. If the "impartial" meaning were intended, we should probably in real life choose a somewhat different form of words, something like (say) "Uncle Bill was a disinterested observer of the proceedings, not a party to them, and he fell asleep in the middle." The sample sentence, in other words, was artificial and contrived, and Chuck Brandstater's reasoning was spot-on: he considered it an "illogical interpretation" to understand "disinterested and fell asleep" as meaning "being impartial and having had a poor night's rest". In this thread we have been going over topics that have been exhaustively discussed before. Let me recommend the article on "disinterested" in Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of Modern English Usage. It points out that "disinterested" in the ethical sense often modifies an abstract noun, e.g. "a disinterested love of learning", and that ambiguities tend to arise only when the "impartial" sense is applied to people and when at the same time the construction and context don't make the intended sense immediately clear, e.g. "A clergyman cannot be disinterested about theology." Here the use of the preposition "about" gives the clue. If "uninterested" were meant, the preposition would probably be "in", not "about". The MWDEU article also points out that "disinterested" and "uninterested" have both long been used in both senses. The use of "uninterested" to mean "impartial" appears to have died out, but the use of "disinterested" to mean "uninterested" has been current since the seventeenth century and has remained current without interruption ever since. Objections to the latter use appear to have arisen only in the late nineteenth century and to have been widely propagated only in the twentieth. Fowler (1926) does not even mention the matter. ------------------------ Date: Fri, 15 March 2002 From: Andy Armitage, ajarmitage@aol.com Whatever the history of whichever use, we have a broad agreement now that 'disinterested' means impartial and 'uninterested' means not engaged by whatever. If distinctions have been drawn, they have probably been drawn for a reason. If we agree on the distinction and stick to it, there need be no ambiguity. To say that the 'misuse' of one word or the other in certain contexts cannot be misinterpreted - because the context tells us what is meant - is to miss the point, the point being that we learn and remember these distinctions in order to be able to use them to avoid ambiguity; and, if we choose not to make the distinction because we can't be bothered, we risk letting both words slide into ambiguity, and then we might find ourselves needing to explain what we mean by one particular use of the word or the other. And that's crazy, since we might as well dump both words and find a pair of new ones to do each job properly - and just hope they don't sound alike! I agree that words are words, and they are there for our benefit, not we for theirs. However, we benefit by making them mean something and then sticking to that, so that we all know what is intended to be conveyed by a particular usage. ------------------------ Date: Fri, 15 March 2002 From: Chuck Brandstater, acreatyv1@earthlink.net Andy wrote in part: > If we agree on the distinction and stick to it, there need be > no ambiguity. I have no idea who this "we" might be: Anglophone society as a whole, some kind of language elite, or neither? Many English words have multiple meanings and even have overlapping meanings with others; Fowler did not declare all ambiguities to be in need of elimination, so why should proponents of his views (in addition to advocating those views more ardently than he did) essentially do so? > To say that the 'misuse' of one word or the other in certain > contexts cannot be misinterpreted - because the context tells > us what is meant - is to miss the point Consider some randomly chosen word that has multiple meanings and that has not been hotly debated like this over the last several decades, but that otherwise has been chosen entirely at random, and you will note that the use of that word with a secondary meaning is unlikely to be misinterpreted when the context hints strongly at what is meant, and you will also note that this is precisely the point. > they must also remember to put a comma before it when they use > it to introduce a nonrestrictive clause. Not "also" in my book; here, as in other contexts with which I shall not bore you at this point in time, I would consider the punctuation to be higher in priority. David wrote in part: > Languages taught in schools are artificial. What we say in the > playground, home, and pub are real languages. Precisely. And our role is not to determine how all the current generation of Anglophone pupils are to be taught to write (still less how anyone is to be taught to speak, in a public forum or otherwise), but only to help shape the writings of our clients and employers; again, we ought not to exaggerate that role. ------------------------ Date: Sat, 16 March 2002 From: Jane Lyle, jlyle@indiana.edu Andy Armitage@aol.com wrote: > Whatever the history of whichever use, we have a broad > agreement now that 'disinterested' means impartial and > 'uninterested' means not engaged by whatever. If distinctions > have been drawn, they have probably been drawn for a reason. If > we agree on the distinction and stick to it, there need be no > ambiguity. The problem, though, is that "we" can't force our preferences on others--no matter how strongly we may feel about our pet distinctions, and no matter how frustrated we may feel about what we see as misuses. All the grammarians and editors in the world can "agree on [a] distinction and stick to it," but we are only a very small percentage of the users of the language. If the majority of those other users ignore what we say and continue to "misuse" the words, we can't stop the process. The language will continue to change around us, as it has changed around our predecessors for hundreds of years. Others have brought up the American Heritage Usage Panel in defense of certain usages, but how long ago was that panel polled? I believe it was in the late 1980s. How many words have come and gone in that time? How many have entered the language and stuck so firmly that we don't even think about how new they are? How many other words have begun to change meaning? How many old meanings that had fallen into disuse have now experienced a resurgence? How big an outcry was there among previous generations of editors about usages that we now consider acceptable at the most formal level--and that we might not even realize were once considered objectionable? It can be dismaying to be caught in the tide of change when we feel strongly about what is changing around us. But if you can step back from it and view it in terms of history and connectedness, it can be a fascinating process to observe. ------------------------ Date: Sat, 16 March 2002 From: Andy Armitage, ajarmitage@aol.com Jane Lyle writes: > The problem, though, is that "we" can't force our preferences > on others--no matter how strongly we may feel about our pet > distinctions, and no matter how frustrated we may feel about > what we see as misuses. Perhaps not, but there are people who have influence on our language and they are the people who write it and edit it and make it public, so that it might influence others, whether at a conscious or subconscious level. This is the 'we' one often hears referred to, and I think people who pretend otherwise know this. ------------------------ Date: Sat, 16 March 2002 From: Esther Shchory, odelias@bezeqint.net Simon Cauchi wrote: > He succeeded in demonstrating the word's ambiguity better than > he expected: we have all -- except John Crane -- interpreted it > to mean "uninterested" or "bored" Not just John. I read disinterested as "impartial" and then realising a lack of sense back-tracked and mentally edited to 'uninterested'; something I frequently do in badly edited text (no offence intended to Nick) Previously, mention has been made of changing the language to modernise, to suit modern usage. I think this is one case where for clarity you need to use the generally accepted meaning. In archaic English and misused modern English disinterested may well be the same as uninterested but most English speakers understand disinterested to mean 'impartial' and, unless the writer wishes to be intentionally obscure, that is probably the best way to use it. ------------------------ Date: Sat, 16 March 2002 From: Mary Ellen Osowski, maryellen.osowski@curriculumassociates.com For those of us who work for educational publishers we must make such decisions all the time and we often follow the most conservative usage. I agree that these "rules" aren't right in some absolute sense. The language of schools may be artificial, but some common ground is necessary for everyday speech to develop in a way that's meaningful to those speakers. =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= END OF EDline 7.83 Admin page: < http://www.electriceditors.net/edline/admin.htm > ** The views expressed in this mailing list are strictly those of the individual contributors, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the moderators or of the Electric Editors. ** Articles (c) 2001, 2002, by individual contributors Design (c) 1996--2002 Iain Brown Compilation (c) 2002, Iain Brown / The Electric Editors =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=