The fact that this 1930-era additional meaning is being described as "new" makes me think that there might also be another meaning of "new" that I wasn't previously aware of!
My current favourite instance of singular 'they' is in the KJV translation of the Book of Job – specifically, the end of chapter 15. The authors used generic 'he' throughout, until they got to a bit they'd have to translate as "his womb". Clearly this was a wee bit radical of a concept for the authors, because they chose instead to write "their belly prepareth deceit".
Also, since it's a religious text, this is a slam dunk counterexample for (e.g.) prescriptivist Mormons. Anyone can handwave Shakespeare, but the Inspired Word of God? They have to admit that singular 'they' is grammatical.
Some churches have the doctrinal position that particular translations were divinely inspired. Indeed, there are people out there who will tell you that the King James Version is the _only_ 100% true and accurate Bible in any language, because God influenced the translators to correct errors in their source material.
(Most other churches think this is extremely silly.)
The antiquity of 'they' as the indefinite singular is well established. "If you do ever figure out whose umbrella this is, do give it back to them, will you?" has always been correct when the identity of the individual (and therefore particulars such as gender) is unknown.
As a definite singular, one used to refer to a known person who relates to gender in a specific way, it is rather new. I have no beef whatsoever with this particular linguistic innovation, but let's not pretend that it isn't one.
A this point I'm just waiting for a Webster article how some people understand "one of" to mean "the only" instead of "a member of the set of". This seems to be getting more common
This was one of my favorite "word of the day" entries, a word every speaker tries to work into their speech, at Toastmasters. The person who introduced it gave the two definitions and then basically said "it's the only word I know that means its opposite" or something to that effect. It got liberal use in every speech, including mine, and I still don't feel comfortable using it correctly.
That one's fun, because they don't really mean the same. It's just that there usually is no functional difference between the meanings.
"to inflame" is to set something on fire. "to flame" is to be on fire. So something that's inflammable can be set on fire, something that's flammable can burn.
I would have said the same thing as you, but it now occurs to me that something that is already on fire must be flammable but it is hardly inflammable since you couldn't set it on fire again (without first putting it out at least).
You could also argue that some things, like most metal powders, are barely inflammable (very hard to light) but are very flammable (once they do burn they burn really well and are hard to put out)
The way it's used on warning labels, "inflammable" means it can combust without an obvious ignition. "Flammable" needs to be set on fire from an external source.
> Cleave is often cited as the go-to contronym: it can refer to splitting something apart and to uniting two things
Weird, I cannot remember ever seeing "cleave" used to mean "uniting two things".
"Inflammable" is my go-to example of a word that shouldn't exist in the English language. Causes too much confusion. I always use "flammable" and "nonflammable".
Ha, you make some good points and I would be ok with those words. But just because the root word (inflame) and some of its derived words are useful, that doesn't mean that we need to allow all possible prefix and suffix derivations of that root word.
Wow. You really want some arbiter of which words are "allowed" or not? That sounds like some real Ministry of Truth type shit. It seems especially weird on a tech site, when tech jargon has historically been rich with wordplay and word construction.
Yeah, never seen that usage of "cleave". I would have expected that sentence written with a different word: "People in the remote mountain villages still cling to their old traditions."
I think I've always assumed it meant "unimpressed." That is not the "new" meaning under discussion, but they seem to hint at it when they say, "This new sense appears to stem from a mistaken belief that the first three letters of nonplus are there to indicate that someone is something other than “plussed” (although what being plussed would entail here remains a mystery)."
I bet my meaning is the next change to this silly word. :)
I have never known it to mean anything except for "perplexed", as a hiberno-English speaker. But now that I do know the newer meaning I'm both mildly nonplussed and totally nonplussed about it.
And this reaction, I think, hint at why this shift has happened: It will often be unclear if someone is unfamiliar with the word, whether it means perplexed or unruffled, because often the same situation would justify either.
You might be perplexed at the reason someone cares about a situation because you yourself is totally unruffled - being both nonplussed and nonplussed about it... At least a couple of the examples they give are ones where either meaning is plausible.
And so if someone is unfamiliar with the word, it'd be easy for them to infer the wrong thing and as a result associate the wrong meaning for the word going forward.
"I looked at Jim and he seemed nonplussed by the situation." Is Jim acting cool and relaxed according to his character, or is he uncharacteristically flustered? The author knows, the reader might not.
Also a hiberno-english speaker, I've always assumed unbothered to be the primary meaning. I was vaguely aware of the autoantonymic usage but definitely felt less common.
That meaning is actually already in webster, together with "not surprised, not bothered" which is probably what the articled describes as unruffled [1].
Not sure why the article pretends like they haven't already added the "new" meaning to their dictionary. Maybe it happened after the article came out
However the article explicitly says "we’d just like to give you fair warning in case our descriptivist nature causes us to take action" which implies that they hadn't actually taken added that meaning at the time of writing.
"NOTE: The use of nonplussed to mean 'unimpressed' is an Americanism that has become increasingly common in recent decades and now appears frequently in published writing. It apparently arose from confusion over the meaning of nonplussed in ambiguous contexts, and it continues to be widely regarded as an error."
The context in which a word is used is typically more informative than the meaning in the dictionary. For example, "set" has an unreasonably large number of definitions [0] but I can't remember the last time its usage in a sentence was confusing.
It's also why "cromulent" from The Simpsons had a clear meaning during the episode that coined the word even though it did not exist prior to the episode airing.
That's how we learn 95% of words' meanings: by osmosis from hearing them used by others whom we presume know their proper meanings. I doubt you've done 100,000 dictionary look-ups, or any number remotely in the ballpark of the number of English words you know.
> "unimpressed." That is not the "new" meaning under discussion
That is pretty much (very close to) the new meaning under discussion: as the article says, the old meaning was “at a loss as to what to say, think, or do”, and the new meaning (started showing up in the early 20th century, though I only encountered it recently) is “unruffled, unconcerned”, which is close to your “unimpressed” (and close to the opposite of the earlier/standard meaning).
(The upshot is that the word “nonplussed” is basically skunked now, and should not be used because readers will misunderstand/be unsure. Some discussion in this thread https://mathstodon.xyz/@dpiponi/111684566418809307 including examples of “enervated” and “livid”, and the observation that the etymology of “non plus” is similar to “I can't even”.)
I never challenged myself to know the origin of this word but I have perhaps unjustifiably assumed this word was a type of doublespeak like the one used in 1984, a way to deliberately draw attention to a system monitoring for disapproval. With the recent automatic censoring of words like 'dead' on various social platforms being shifted to 'unalived' the same spirit of mockery persists.
As an American, I assume without evidence that it's way more common in British English, because over here it feels like an exotic word that people only pull out to be semi-fancy, like "whom".
The Americans who know when to use whom and who and Americans who think they know when to use whom and who are those who use whom, while Americans whom the distiction between who and whom thouroughly confuses and Americans to whom whom is entirely unknown are those by whom who is solely used.
Oh it's a bit more complicated than that. There are also those who don't use whom because they know it's a relic of a case system that has been gradually fading for a thousand years. Not to mention those whom use it incorrectly on purpose to annoy the pedants.
Kudos for writing the entire sentence without making a mistake (yes, I checked). Although perhaps the use of 'whilst' would complete the intended stylistic flare?
> as an American a sentence like "Whom did you invite to the party?" sounds a bit stilted and formal to me
It would be fair to call this ungrammatical in American English.
But whom does survive in fronted prepositional phrases ("the person for whom this item was obtained..."). It's dead in prepositional phrases that haven't been fronted just like it's dead everywhere else.
Something vaguely similar happened in Spanish, where there is a special pronoun case that can only be used with the preposition con ("with"). There, the special case descends from, interestingly enough, the same preposition, Latin cum, instead of from the Latin case system. But the phenomenon ends up being the same.
Yet, among those with whom I associate, "Who didja..." is more common than the semantically equivalent elision "Who'd you", probably because it is ambiguous whether the latter is in the past or present tense.
(For context, I live in south-west England, have an RP accent, and 'whom' was genuinely the word that felt most natural to me when writing this post.)
People speak of the future conditional so rarely, it doesn't affect linguistic evolution.
"Whodja" being shorter and less stuttery than "whodidja" is a much more powerful driver. Like "Wensday", unless you actually need to disambiguate past from future.
like an exotic word that people only pull out to be semi-fancy, like "whom"
Semi-fancy? Man, that's a pretty low bar for fifty-cent words. I use it so I sound like I actually went to school and paid attention. If those with whom I speak find basic grammar fancy, that's on them.
What makes the latter sentence sound highfalutin is that you've been required to contort it away from idiomatic American English sentence structure in order to force in a "whom". The usual way of phrasing the sentence avoids "who" entirely: "If the people I speak with" or "If the people I'm talking to".
Give me a sentence where it necessarily eliminates ambiguity and I will thoughtlessly replace it with something more colloquial and similarly unambiguous.
It's possible you'll find an example I can't trivially fix, but I think they're rare enough to be more or less irrelevant.
Yeah, if I was a non-native English speaker, I'd be nonplussed about the word (both meanings).
But some commonly used words are confusing. Sanction means both to allow and to disallow. Literally is a nightmare, especially in written form, but also spoken without enough cultural context.
I don't like all these examples, but here's a list of 40 mostly common words or two word phrases that mean their opposite. [1] There's probably 10-20 of those that a new to English speaker is likely to run into. But then, I never got far enough into other languages, maybe this is a common phenomenon.
> But some commonly used words are confusing. Sanction means both to allow and to disallow.
Well, technically, it means to allow or to punish. But you're close enough. It does have these two senses, they are obviously in tension with each other, and both are common.
But, because both senses are common, this isn't a source of confusion. (And the later sense of punishment did not arise from confusion on the part of speakers, as is the case for nonplussed.)
As a non native its always fun to learn new vocab. A few months ago I heard the word Vicariously for like the second or third time, and when I looked at the definition it was interestingly both complex and very human at the same time:
experienced or realized through imaginative or sympathetic participation in the experience of another.
Hmmm, is the second definition here [1] the "screwed up" one?
> An issue regarded as potentially debatable, but no longer practically applicable. Although the idea may still be worth debating and exploring academically ... the idea has been rendered irrelevant for the present issue.
That's literally the only way I've heard it. (American here.) I'm nonplussed about this.
"The second usage given is modern and is the meaning more commonly understood in American English, possibly because of the association with moot court."
"Up for debate but not decided yet"
"Debatable, but decision doesn't matter".
It's a natural ambiguity, resolved by context, one of many, many in language. Which one is correct is a mute point.
JK Rowling uses it frequently in the Harry Potter series, a series aimed at children. I assume her editors carefully combed her words for anything that may confuse a child. Nonplussed got through. Perhaps because British editors thought nonplussed is easy to understand?
I've pretty much given up on trying to fight the evolution in the meaning of words. Singular "they" was one I resisted for a long time, but it's a lost cause. It still trips me up to hear it or especially to read it: what? did another person suddenly enter this context? I still avoid it myself, and think its use reduces clarity, but it is what it is.
Word usage changes, evolves. A word or a different meaning of a word often starts as slang, then expands to become common usage. It's usually (but not always) apparent from context what the writer means. And, following the guidance of Strunk and White, don't use a fancy, uncommon, or potentially confusing word when plain words will do the job. Writing "he was at a loss" or "she didn't know what to do" is a few more words but much clearer to more readers than "he was nonplussed."
Singular "they" was one I resisted for a long time, but it's a lost cause.
I've had almost the opposite experience from you. I'd long embraced it as the correct word to use when referring to a person of unknown gender or to a hypothetical individual, but having to use it regarding real people caused me problems. When my wife became coworkers with a non-binary person and its usage came up every few days, the better I got at gendering them properly the worse I got at everyone else. First I started accidentally calling her other friends "they", and then I started sometimes referring to any woman as "they". Fortunately that coworker took a job elsewhere before I started referring to men as they too.
I purposefully and unapologetically try to refer to everyone as "they" these days. A person's gender is rarely relevant (and can often lead to stereotyping), so I see no need to mention it every time I refer to them. And it makes life a lot simpler.
While not strictly improper, this feels needlessly confrontational and pushing of an ideology. You might find you ruffle more feathers than you think by doing this.
Some people seem not to like it (most don't care), but nothing else gets special treatment in language (one doesn't refer to people of different races using different pronouns for example - there are special titles like sir/lord/reverend, but I try to avoid those too), and I think it's good to challenge people's assumptions around this kind of thing.
I have no objection to avoiding assumptions about a person's gender. It's unfortunate in my opinion that we chose "they" which is gender-neutral but also plural. That is entirely where the issue is for me. I'd have no objection to a singular gender-neutral word (which unfortunately doesn't exist in English). "One" sometimes works, but often sounds too formal. Or reworking the sentence so that "they" is approprate, e.g. "Each person should do it for themselves" isn't terrible, and not too confusing, but better is either "People should do it for themselves" or "One should do it for oneself." The worst is something like "The manager decided that they should do it for themselves" which I see a lot, especially recently. Who is "they" referring to here? The manager? Some other group? It's confusing.
Yes I know that singular "they" has existed for a long time but nobody apparently told my English teachers who would circle it in red every time I accidentally used it.
> Yes I know that singular "they" has existed for a long time but nobody apparently told my English teachers who would circle it in red every time I accidentally used it.
I remember reading in the 80s or 90s there was a movement to actively eliminate it.
Yes, I learned (mostly from female teachers) that "he" should be interpreted as gender-neutral if the gender of a singular subject was unknown, e.g. "A writer should always consider his audience" did not imply that only males are writers. It would be nice if people could charitably assume that, but I understand that it can be problematic.
> I'd have no objection to a singular gender-neutral word (which unfortunately doesn't exist in English).
Yes it does. "He" is the gender neutral expression in English and has been since forever. It's just that politically correct people get bent out of shape about it.
It isn't gender neutral, it's a gender default. Unless you think it would be correct for the student handbook at an all-girls school to read "every student shall store his books in his assigned locker".
You didn't invent singular "they" as a child, you were using it because that's what you'd naturally heard and picked up.
Then ignorant teachers told you that you were wrong and they were so successful in brainwashing you, that even after you have learned you were actually correct, you are still trying to argue you were wrong!
Seriously, I think a lot of what drives these conversations is that people get a bit emotional about what are really somewhat randomly-formed preferences.
However you first encountered the usage of a word will likely heavily influence what you think of as the 'correct' definition, unless you work to overcome your bias by actually studying the etymology and comparing it statistically against current trends. Obviously very few peeps will be down with that noise.
I hate this word. When I'm reading a novel it's often hard to tell which meaning the author intends, and whether a character is confused by something or unbothered by something can be important.
The word is skunked at this point. Using it guarantees that readers are going to have to pause and refer to the context, and depending on the context it may not even be possible to confidently disambiguate. Luckily both meanings have ample synonyms.
Oh, how interesting - I had a personal 'eggcorn' interpretation that it was an elision of "and on" (which also makes sense in many contexts), and never connected it to the word "anon" in writing!
I'm not sure what his origin was for the term, but "skunked" as an adjective to me indicates a beer that was spoiled by exposure to light and/or heat. It's gone off.
According to Wikipedia's summary of the situation, the French are to blame for the ambiguity - no surprises there! ;) But if we're going to avoid Americanisms, the better way is simply to use the word 'milliard', which makes perfect, unambiguous sense in any language.
Oh, good point... Right, back to the drawing board - how about "kilocount" for a thousand, "megacount" for a million, and "gigacounts" for a (short) billion? The prefixes were apparently resurrected from the Greek for use in the metric system, but haven't had any other contradictory meanings as far as I can tell. I know I'm mixing up the Greek and Latin roots with "-count", but "kiloarithmos" is two syllables too many!
I learned something here. But reading the archaic English examples, I wonder if previous writers (the first ones to bring the 'nonplussed' term to English) had a proper plague of editors and language sticklers pouring through their writing. Because if they had, they could have "canceled" those writers out of print for borrowing yet another Latin wording.
I’m fairly nonplussed at what has happened to “begging the question” - its usage now is an inversion of its original philosophical meaning as a form of fallacy. It’s common usage is a way of saying “the question arises”.
I take objection to the characterization of "begging the question" having a changed/incorrect meaning. I assert that the "original philosophical meaning" is the fad idiom, and the common usage is a true parsing of the words unrelated to the idiom.
"This begs the question of why X Y Z" is just a shortening of "this [thing you said] begs [that] the question [be asked] of why X Y Z".
I think the only reason there's any discussion about it at all is because the sorts of people who are likely to use the idiom of "begging the question" with regard to logic, are the sort of people who enjoy being pedantic about other people's language, and this presents an opportunity to do so.
You could say I'm plussed about the whole thing. It brings up a whelming amount of emotion in me.
You would like a citation that people with an interest in rhetoric and logic tend to be pedantic and more likely to correct others if they see an opportunity to do so? I cite the comment section of https://news.ycombinator.com/news
You see a lot of this kind of thing: "spiders aren't bugs", "whales aren't fish", "strawberries aren't berries"—no, words mean things, unfortunately, even if that's a little inconvenient for taxonomers!
Merriam-Webster brags in TFA about their descriptivist reputation; and indeed, they are thw arch-descriptivists. But I'm not aware of any contemporary publisher of dictionaries that doesn't take a descriptivist stance.
This places pendants like me at a serious disadvantage; I can't rely on a dictionary to help me win arguments about correct usage.
"Nonplussed" is like "disgruntled"; you can't be plussed, and you can't be gruntled.
American Heritage is much better. They respond to usage, but much more conservatively. And their entries will actually have brief explanations from their "usage panel" about ambiguous or changing meanings.
> It had been a rough day, so when I walked into the party I was very chalant, despite my efforts to appear gruntled and consolate.
> I was furling my wieldy umbrella for the coat check when I saw her standing alone in a corner. She was a descript person, a woman in a state of total array. Her hair was kempt, her clothing shevelled, and she moved in a gainly way.
> I wanted desperately to meet her, but I knew I'd have to make bones about it, since I was travelling cognito. Beknownst to me, the hostess, whom I could see both hide and hair of, was very proper, so it would be skin off my nose if anything bad happened. And even though I had only swerving loyalty to her, my manners couldn't be peccable. Only toward and heard-of behavior would do.
> This places pendants like me at a serious disadvantage; I can't rely on a dictionary to help me win arguments about correct usage.
I feel like you're being sent a strong signal about what "correct" means re usage but refusing to heed it.
Dictionaries aren't descriptivist because of an idealogical commitment or whatever; a strictly prescriptivist stance is simply not very useful for achieving the goals that a dictionary has.
> simply not very useful for achieving the goals that a dictionary has.
Apparently the dictionary's goals are not the same as my goals. Sure, I want to know about incorrect usages; but I also want to know that those usages are incorrect.
Say that an English speaker speaks a sentence, and an English listener understands it. If they both agree that it was an English sentence -- including no jargon -- and they both agree on the meaning of the sentence, then that's correct English. If the two individuals have also never met before, then it's certainly correct English.
That's what "defined by usage" means. English does not have a language regulator or language academy.
FWIW that's also how languages work that do have an academy. The academy may be a participant in the process but they don't control it, that's basically just a relic of before we understood how languages work.
> that's basically just a relic of before we understood how languages work
Relics that unfortunately maintain significant influence in at least France and Germany.
When I grew up and was just learning to write, orthography was "revamped" by literal committee, in some cases even going so far as deriving a new spelling via false etymologies.
It wasn't really a big deal for me practically, but it just seems bizarre.
English does have lexicographers, though. I should be able to turn to a dictionary to find out what "literally" means, and it's regrettable that that inquiry will tell me the word has two directly-opposed meanings, without noting that one of them is wrong.
I think you are mistaking the map for the territory. I think you are blaming the data (actual usage) when the model is wrong (dictionaries).
"Literally" is allowed to have a valid and true definition of "figuratively" because exaggeration and hyperbole are used for rhetoric and expression. That's a vital and popular way language is used, and in the case of "literally" it is so commonly encountered that it worth noting in descriptive texts that it's common.
I understood what you meant I was just trying to gently point out that it's not a goal that is valued or even taken seriously by people who study language, including lexicographers. Some curiosity about why that is could take you pretty far here.
I know why it is; I know that language changes, and I know that one task of lexicographers is to record those changes. But I don't think they should give the same status to a usage that is just a decade old, and restricted to casual chit-chat among teenagers, as one would accord to a usage that is established over centuries.
According to TFA, "nonplussed" is from Latin "non plus" (no more), and it doesn't seem to have ever had that meaning in English. So I don't really care about "nonplussed". I do care about "literally" (by the letter), and the fact that lexicographers treat its usage to mean "figuratively" as perfectly legitimate. At least, the dictionaries should point out that the version I consider wrong is slang.
The result is that the word "literally" can't now be used in precise discourse, and you have to find some awkward circumlocution. This kind of abuse makes the language less expressive, and is cause for regret.
I had to check m-w's entry for "literally". While they do include a sense 2 that is similar to "figuratively", there is a substantial note afterwards and an FAQ that does a great job of explaining the status of the two senses and a touch of their history. They give some facts that contradict your above, as well (related to the timeline, as well as what constitutes slang). In case you're interested: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/literally
I do think this is what the dictionary should say. It describes actual usage, including disagreements about it.
By the way, I do think there is a place for linguistic prescriptions, it's just in style guides rather than dictionaries. E.g., fine for the Economist to decide "literally" will only be used in its literal sense in their pages.
> This places pendants like me at a serious disadvantage; I can’t rely on a dictionary to help me win arguments about correct usage.
First, unless you are dangling from a piece of jewelry, “pedants”, not “pendants”.
Second, stop worrying about “correct” usage and worry about clear and effective communication. It’s a lot less useful and convincing to argue that a usage is wrong by some arbitrary standard than to argue, e.g., that it promotes confusion where an alternative expression would be more clear to the target audience. Not only is it a more useful approach, it also lets you get benefit from dictionaries again.
Yeah, that’s literally the worst. I hope you also only use “terrific” in the original meaning (terrifying) instead of this silly modern usage… (joking, of course)
As a French, and as to uphold our reputation as an arrogant bunch, I though it was adopted from the French language. "moi non plus" means "me neither" so "I'm nonplussed" = "I have no idea either".
> Mistake it may well be, but the fact remains that this sense of the word is in widespread use today, and may be found often enough in well regarded and highly edited, publications.
I would say you are most likely to find this usage of that word in well regarded and highly edited, publications.
> By the early 17th century nonplus was being used as a verb, with the meaning of “to cause to be at a loss as to what to say, think, or do.” Then, as now, the word is often encountered in its participial form (nonplussed), with a meaning that is nearly synonymous with “perplexed.”
I never knew this meaning - as far as I remember I've always interpreted it as some form of "unconcerned" / "that's not relevant to me". I guess by outward appearance "at a loss for words" and "unconcerned" are kinda similar, even if the cause is different, which is why it's always fit well-enough in context.
On a tangential note, one of my pet peeves is the way that many people (mostly Americans?) pronounce words like "processes" as "process-eez".
Words with Greek roots that end in -is or -es generally use the -eez suffix. e.g. analysis -> analyses; thesis -> theses
In the case of Latin, it's -ix or -ex. e.g. index - indices, appendix - appendices.
There are of course exceptions and outliers (suffix -> suffixes; octopus -> octopodes!?), but words like "process" and "bias" do not fall into the categories mentioned, so there's no reason to use the non-standard "processeez" and "biaseez". Unless - IMO - you want to sound like a snob... Think about it - how does one pronounce words like "successes" or "princesses"?
One could argue that language evolves - this is true, but in general language evolves to have simpler rules with fewer exceptions rather than the other way around.
I not sure what you're talking about. I'm referring to things where pronunciation is generally based on the etymology. I don't think the word "adjective" falls into this category. One could perhaps make a case for aluminum vs aluminium (cf: platinum), but those are pretty much different words that refer to the same thing.
"Process-eez" is the same word as "processes" with a pronunciation based on a misunderstanding (presumably) of the etymological "rules".
By and large they do. English, like all indo European languages, used to have many grammatical cases and verb forms. Now we mostly retain cases in pronouns, and most verbs are about two forms per tense.
Latin used to have all its cases suffixes, and today's Romance languages have dropped nearly all of them.
English has simple verb and noun morphology, but very complicated syntax and phonology. Hard to say that it’s uniformly more or less complex than Latin.
Really? I think it's the opposite. One does things like this because one is afraid of being assailed by pedants and made to feel inferior. This is why, I think, I hear people, mostly British, say things like "to so-and-so and I". They're afraid to use the wrong form or the pronoun and be scolded, so they overcorrect.
And about this:
> in general language evolves to have simpler rules with fewer exceptions rather than the other way around.
I don't think that's generally true. Rather, language changes in many ways, but one of them is the accumulation of exceptions to a formerly simple system. This gives us the complex paradigms of "be" and "go", for example.
I enjoy intentionally mispronouncing words to my fiancee, and this one is definitely going into the rotation, so thank you for that! (Now, to figure out how to get "tortoise" into casual conversation.)
Notably, it's only the noun plural that becomes "-eez" ("these processes"), while the verb present tense remains "-iz" ("she processes his application").
It seems to be going along with the gradual adoption of "often" with a "t" sound -- "off-tuhn" instead of "off-uhn".
Nobody said it with a "t" when and where I grew up (or on TV that I remember), because obviously the second syllable of "often" was the same as in "soften", "moisten", "hasten", "fasten", "glisten", and so forth. All silent t's.
But now it's at the point where probably a majority of people I hear on television and podcasts, as well as in my personal life, pronounce the "t". But only in "often" -- not in a single one of the other words I listed.
Both "often" and "processes" seem to fall in the category of hypercorrection, where people are trying to sound more correct.
I've heard both, and the "-esseez" plural just seems less ambiguous on poor videoconferencing lines and recordings. "-esses" is a mouthful to pronounce.
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Also, since it's a religious text, this is a slam dunk counterexample for (e.g.) prescriptivist Mormons. Anyone can handwave Shakespeare, but the Inspired Word of God? They have to admit that singular 'they' is grammatical.
(Most other churches think this is extremely silly.)
As a definite singular, one used to refer to a known person who relates to gender in a specific way, it is rather new. I have no beef whatsoever with this particular linguistic innovation, but let's not pretend that it isn't one.
Wait, shouldn't it be the second one, right after _petrichor_?
https://www.merriam-webster.com/wordplay/words-own-opposites
-Dr Nick
"to inflame" is to set something on fire. "to flame" is to be on fire. So something that's inflammable can be set on fire, something that's flammable can burn.
> Cleave is often cited as the go-to contronym: it can refer to splitting something apart and to uniting two things
Weird, I cannot remember ever seeing "cleave" used to mean "uniting two things".
"Inflammable" is my go-to example of a word that shouldn't exist in the English language. Causes too much confusion. I always use "flammable" and "nonflammable".
What about "inflammation" (from the same root), like what happens when you bruise yourself, or injure a joint? Is that OK?
Or you should you get a "flammation" instead?
Edit: Or when interpersonal tensions are high, and a situation becomes inflamed?
http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/introduction.html
http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/writing-style.html
Here's an example I stole from the internet [1] "People in the remote mountain villages still cleave to their old traditions."
I'll leave other examples of cleavage meaning two things coming together to your imagination.
[1] https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/cleave-t...
With regards to "cleavage", I always thought that it was based on the other meaning of the word, the one about splitting things apart: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/cleavage
"Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh." - Genesis 2:24
That guy is a literal pain in my behind.
I bet my meaning is the next change to this silly word. :)
You might be perplexed at the reason someone cares about a situation because you yourself is totally unruffled - being both nonplussed and nonplussed about it... At least a couple of the examples they give are ones where either meaning is plausible.
And so if someone is unfamiliar with the word, it'd be easy for them to infer the wrong thing and as a result associate the wrong meaning for the word going forward.
Also a hiberno-english speaker, I've always assumed unbothered to be the primary meaning. I was vaguely aware of the autoantonymic usage but definitely felt less common.
Not sure why the article pretends like they haven't already added the "new" meaning to their dictionary. Maybe it happened after the article came out
1: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/nonplussed
Read: only dumb people use it this way.
("struck dumb" is a synonym for "nonplussed" !)
It's also why "cromulent" from The Simpsons had a clear meaning during the episode that coined the word even though it did not exist prior to the episode airing.
[0]: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/set
That is pretty much (very close to) the new meaning under discussion: as the article says, the old meaning was “at a loss as to what to say, think, or do”, and the new meaning (started showing up in the early 20th century, though I only encountered it recently) is “unruffled, unconcerned”, which is close to your “unimpressed” (and close to the opposite of the earlier/standard meaning).
(The upshot is that the word “nonplussed” is basically skunked now, and should not be used because readers will misunderstand/be unsure. Some discussion in this thread https://mathstodon.xyz/@dpiponi/111684566418809307 including examples of “enervated” and “livid”, and the observation that the etymology of “non plus” is similar to “I can't even”.)
Don't make me delve any deeper into pedantry ("with whom we use...")
Americans use "whom" some, especially in formal writing and/or speech, but colloquially "who" is much more common.
For example, as an American a sentence like "Whom did you invite to the party?" sounds a bit stilted and formal to me.
It would be fair to call this ungrammatical in American English.
But whom does survive in fronted prepositional phrases ("the person for whom this item was obtained..."). It's dead in prepositional phrases that haven't been fronted just like it's dead everywhere else.
Something vaguely similar happened in Spanish, where there is a special pronoun case that can only be used with the preposition con ("with"). There, the special case descends from, interestingly enough, the same preposition, Latin cum, instead of from the Latin case system. But the phenomenon ends up being the same.
https://www.nytimes.com/1993/04/11/theater/sunday-view-party...
Try polling some people on that.
"To whom did you give the book?" is more often "Who'd you give the book to?" complete with the similarly forbidden preposition.
(For context, I live in south-west England, have an RP accent, and 'whom' was genuinely the word that felt most natural to me when writing this post.)
Semi-fancy? Man, that's a pretty low bar for fifty-cent words. I use it so I sound like I actually went to school and paid attention. If those with whom I speak find basic grammar fancy, that's on them.
It's the "m", not the sentence structure. The awkward archaic structure is a different, often comorbid, affectation among Latinophiles.
Them's fightin' words. 'Whom' is super useful because it is grammatically necessary.
Which means it's of particularly limited use to a foreign speaker.
But some commonly used words are confusing. Sanction means both to allow and to disallow. Literally is a nightmare, especially in written form, but also spoken without enough cultural context.
I don't like all these examples, but here's a list of 40 mostly common words or two word phrases that mean their opposite. [1] There's probably 10-20 of those that a new to English speaker is likely to run into. But then, I never got far enough into other languages, maybe this is a common phenomenon.
[1] https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/57032/25-words-are-their...
Well, technically, it means to allow or to punish. But you're close enough. It does have these two senses, they are obviously in tension with each other, and both are common.
But, because both senses are common, this isn't a source of confusion. (And the later sense of punishment did not arise from confusion on the part of speakers, as is the case for nonplussed.)
experienced or realized through imaginative or sympathetic participation in the experience of another.
But frequently I’ve seen it used in the context of perplexed about the fuss - which I guess has contributed to the newer meaning
Wikipedia has it on 'List of words having different meanings in American and British English'
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_words_having_different...
> An issue regarded as potentially debatable, but no longer practically applicable. Although the idea may still be worth debating and exploring academically ... the idea has been rendered irrelevant for the present issue.
That's literally the only way I've heard it. (American here.) I'm nonplussed about this.
1. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/moot_point
"Up for debate but not decided yet"
"Debatable, but decision doesn't matter".
It's a natural ambiguity, resolved by context, one of many, many in language. Which one is correct is a mute point.
Word usage changes, evolves. A word or a different meaning of a word often starts as slang, then expands to become common usage. It's usually (but not always) apparent from context what the writer means. And, following the guidance of Strunk and White, don't use a fancy, uncommon, or potentially confusing word when plain words will do the job. Writing "he was at a loss" or "she didn't know what to do" is a few more words but much clearer to more readers than "he was nonplussed."
I've had almost the opposite experience from you. I'd long embraced it as the correct word to use when referring to a person of unknown gender or to a hypothetical individual, but having to use it regarding real people caused me problems. When my wife became coworkers with a non-binary person and its usage came up every few days, the better I got at gendering them properly the worse I got at everyone else. First I started accidentally calling her other friends "they", and then I started sometimes referring to any woman as "they". Fortunately that coworker took a job elsewhere before I started referring to men as they too.
Yes I know that singular "they" has existed for a long time but nobody apparently told my English teachers who would circle it in red every time I accidentally used it.
I remember reading in the 80s or 90s there was a movement to actively eliminate it.
Yes it does. "He" is the gender neutral expression in English and has been since forever. It's just that politically correct people get bent out of shape about it.
Referring to them as women (hence 'she') is simply an affectation.
Then ignorant teachers told you that you were wrong and they were so successful in brainwashing you, that even after you have learned you were actually correct, you are still trying to argue you were wrong!
Seriously, I think a lot of what drives these conversations is that people get a bit emotional about what are really somewhat randomly-formed preferences.
However you first encountered the usage of a word will likely heavily influence what you think of as the 'correct' definition, unless you work to overcome your bias by actually studying the etymology and comparing it statistically against current trends. Obviously very few peeps will be down with that noise.
They don’t start off in the dictionary!
"I will be there anon!"
If anyone complains about me being there either too early or too late, or neither, I point them to the dictionary:
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/anon
It can either mean "now", "soon", or "later".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skunked_term
I'm not sure what his origin was for the term, but "skunked" as an adjective to me indicates a beer that was spoiled by exposure to light and/or heat. It's gone off.
Does it mean something other than 1,000,000,000?
EDIT: Apparently in some cultures, it means a million million, ie, 1,000,000,000,000, or what most people would call "trillion".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billion
So all that accomplishes is conflating thousand with million with billion. (Of course "million" is already a conflation of "thousand"!)
Then they came for nonplussed and I still did nothing because I'm still not a pedant.
I sure hope they don't come for pedant next.
"This begs the question of why X Y Z" is just a shortening of "this [thing you said] begs [that] the question [be asked] of why X Y Z".
I think the only reason there's any discussion about it at all is because the sorts of people who are likely to use the idiom of "begging the question" with regard to logic, are the sort of people who enjoy being pedantic about other people's language, and this presents an opportunity to do so.
You could say I'm plussed about the whole thing. It brings up a whelming amount of emotion in me.
This one is particularly egregious, because they literally are.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/bug
They may not be insects, but non-insect arthropods are included in the definition of "bug".
It was a stupid translation, so I don't mind people retaking the words for their actual meaning.
"Begging the question" is an expression that properly means "assuming the conclusion," i.e. circular reasoning.
However, the comment above deliberately uses the incorrect meaning "raising the question."
(original Latin meaning ;)
This places pendants like me at a serious disadvantage; I can't rely on a dictionary to help me win arguments about correct usage.
"Nonplussed" is like "disgruntled"; you can't be plussed, and you can't be gruntled.
Color me doubleplussed
https://dictionary.com
> I was furling my wieldy umbrella for the coat check when I saw her standing alone in a corner. She was a descript person, a woman in a state of total array. Her hair was kempt, her clothing shevelled, and she moved in a gainly way.
> I wanted desperately to meet her, but I knew I'd have to make bones about it, since I was travelling cognito. Beknownst to me, the hostess, whom I could see both hide and hair of, was very proper, so it would be skin off my nose if anything bad happened. And even though I had only swerving loyalty to her, my manners couldn't be peccable. Only toward and heard-of behavior would do.
etc.
- Jack Winter
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/kempt
Google Books Ngram Viewer for kempt vs unkempt: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=kempt%2C+unkem...
I feel like you're being sent a strong signal about what "correct" means re usage but refusing to heed it.
Dictionaries aren't descriptivist because of an idealogical commitment or whatever; a strictly prescriptivist stance is simply not very useful for achieving the goals that a dictionary has.
Apparently the dictionary's goals are not the same as my goals. Sure, I want to know about incorrect usages; but I also want to know that those usages are incorrect.
Say that an English speaker speaks a sentence, and an English listener understands it. If they both agree that it was an English sentence -- including no jargon -- and they both agree on the meaning of the sentence, then that's correct English. If the two individuals have also never met before, then it's certainly correct English.
That's what "defined by usage" means. English does not have a language regulator or language academy.
Relics that unfortunately maintain significant influence in at least France and Germany.
When I grew up and was just learning to write, orthography was "revamped" by literal committee, in some cases even going so far as deriving a new spelling via false etymologies.
It wasn't really a big deal for me practically, but it just seems bizarre.
English does have lexicographers, though. I should be able to turn to a dictionary to find out what "literally" means, and it's regrettable that that inquiry will tell me the word has two directly-opposed meanings, without noting that one of them is wrong.
"Literally" is allowed to have a valid and true definition of "figuratively" because exaggeration and hyperbole are used for rhetoric and expression. That's a vital and popular way language is used, and in the case of "literally" it is so commonly encountered that it worth noting in descriptive texts that it's common.
According to TFA, "nonplussed" is from Latin "non plus" (no more), and it doesn't seem to have ever had that meaning in English. So I don't really care about "nonplussed". I do care about "literally" (by the letter), and the fact that lexicographers treat its usage to mean "figuratively" as perfectly legitimate. At least, the dictionaries should point out that the version I consider wrong is slang.
The result is that the word "literally" can't now be used in precise discourse, and you have to find some awkward circumlocution. This kind of abuse makes the language less expressive, and is cause for regret.
Why can't the English learn to speak?
~ Prof. Henry Higgins
I do think this is what the dictionary should say. It describes actual usage, including disagreements about it.
By the way, I do think there is a place for linguistic prescriptions, it's just in style guides rather than dictionaries. E.g., fine for the Economist to decide "literally" will only be used in its literal sense in their pages.
Why? It's a perfectly cromulent word: https://comb.io/tVAKjq
First, unless you are dangling from a piece of jewelry, “pedants”, not “pendants”.
Second, stop worrying about “correct” usage and worry about clear and effective communication. It’s a lot less useful and convincing to argue that a usage is wrong by some arbitrary standard than to argue, e.g., that it promotes confusion where an alternative expression would be more clear to the target audience. Not only is it a more useful approach, it also lets you get benefit from dictionaries again.
I noticed my fat-finger mistake, but it was too late to edit.
> worry about clear and effective communication
Oh, I do. That's why I object to using "literally" to mean "figuratively", i.e. the exact opposite.
I mean, I don't object to ignorant people using words ignorantly; but lexicographers know better, and should be calling out ignorant usages.
And this is we end up with words like 'combobulate'.
"No more" can have many slightly different meanings... I think this specifically means "no further/not more" rather than "no longer"
I would say you are most likely to find this usage of that word in well regarded and highly edited, publications.
I never knew this meaning - as far as I remember I've always interpreted it as some form of "unconcerned" / "that's not relevant to me". I guess by outward appearance "at a loss for words" and "unconcerned" are kinda similar, even if the cause is different, which is why it's always fit well-enough in context.
Words with Greek roots that end in -is or -es generally use the -eez suffix. e.g. analysis -> analyses; thesis -> theses
In the case of Latin, it's -ix or -ex. e.g. index - indices, appendix - appendices.
There are of course exceptions and outliers (suffix -> suffixes; octopus -> octopodes!?), but words like "process" and "bias" do not fall into the categories mentioned, so there's no reason to use the non-standard "processeez" and "biaseez". Unless - IMO - you want to sound like a snob... Think about it - how does one pronounce words like "successes" or "princesses"?
One could argue that language evolves - this is true, but in general language evolves to have simpler rules with fewer exceptions rather than the other way around.
Stop, let's all try to stop the madnesseez.
"Process-eez" is the same word as "processes" with a pronunciation based on a misunderstanding (presumably) of the etymological "rules".
Latin used to have all its cases suffixes, and today's Romance languages have dropped nearly all of them.
A related reddit thread (I know, I know, sorry): https://old.reddit.com/r/linguistics/comments/o12hy0/instanc...
It's worth noting of course that there is more to grammar than morphology.
Really? I think it's the opposite. One does things like this because one is afraid of being assailed by pedants and made to feel inferior. This is why, I think, I hear people, mostly British, say things like "to so-and-so and I". They're afraid to use the wrong form or the pronoun and be scolded, so they overcorrect.
And about this:
> in general language evolves to have simpler rules with fewer exceptions rather than the other way around.
I don't think that's generally true. Rather, language changes in many ways, but one of them is the accumulation of exceptions to a formerly simple system. This gives us the complex paradigms of "be" and "go", for example.
Do you pronounce "tortoise" like "bourgeoise" because you don't want to sound inferior?
I jest, but it's like your argument is making my case for me. Replace "snob" with "pedant" to see what I mean.
Notably, it's only the noun plural that becomes "-eez" ("these processes"), while the verb present tense remains "-iz" ("she processes his application").
It seems to be going along with the gradual adoption of "often" with a "t" sound -- "off-tuhn" instead of "off-uhn".
Nobody said it with a "t" when and where I grew up (or on TV that I remember), because obviously the second syllable of "often" was the same as in "soften", "moisten", "hasten", "fasten", "glisten", and so forth. All silent t's.
But now it's at the point where probably a majority of people I hear on television and podcasts, as well as in my personal life, pronounce the "t". But only in "often" -- not in a single one of the other words I listed.
Both "often" and "processes" seem to fall in the category of hypercorrection, where people are trying to sound more correct.