I've always thought that people misunderstood nonplussed because they interpret it as "not fussed".
What's Going on with ‘Nonplussed’? (2017)
121–130 of 337 posts
Re: What's Going on with ‘Nonplussed’? (2017)
#122Hearing the word nonplussed always reminds me of this scene in Archer, https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=kCwpregWfKc
That's the only time I can recall ever encountering the word in the wild. I've probably seen it in passing, in a newspaper column or a novel, but Archer is the only reference I distinctly remember. It's not a widely-known or widely-used word.
Re: What's Going on with ‘Nonplussed’? (2017)
#123Re: What's Going on with ‘Nonplussed’? (2017)
#124As a Brit, I don't think I've ever encountered the latter meaning. I've only ever heard it to mean 'perplexed'.
Its clearly a UK/USA split, for some reason the article does not mention this.
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...
Re: What's Going on with ‘Nonplussed’? (2017)
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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.…
> 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.
Re: What's Going on with ‘Nonplussed’? (2017)
#126Re: What's Going on with ‘Nonplussed’? (2017)
#127Words and meaning. This talks about how words come to mean something else. Nonplussed was "not knowing what to do". Now it is becoming "unruffled". But it raises a question. Do words evolve by mistake, or do they evolve because we need to say something and we don't have the right word for it? Unruffled, unaffected, unimpressed - for me all have a sense of ignoring a situation. Nixon was unaffected by student protests…
I think there are at least two forces that lead to words changing meaning: 1. We are looking to express a emotion but want to empathize it more. Existing words get "used up" because we tend to inflate the strength. This is how we get words like "sick!", "awesome" (which changed meaning quite a while ago). Either new words get created or existing ones get taken over. 2. Some people literally don't understand the origi…
> Some people literally don't understand the original meaning and their usage takes over. Supposedly this has happened with "literally".
What happened with literally is not that people didn't understand it's meaning and started using it with some other meaning. What happened with it is what happened with "very" a much longer time ago: it started being used as a generic augmentative adverb and started losing its specific meaning.
When I say "this coffee is so bitter I'll literally die", I'm using literally as an augmentative, as an exaggeration. Similarly, originally when you used "very bitter" it would mean "truly bitter", but overtime it started becoming just a formulaic way of strengthening the meaning of bitter.
Re: What's Going on with ‘Nonplussed’? (2017)
#128Words and meaning. This talks about how words come to mean something else. Nonplussed was "not knowing what to do". Now it is becoming "unruffled". But it raises a question. Do words evolve by mistake, or do they evolve because we need to say something and we don't have the right word for it? Unruffled, unaffected, unimpressed - for me all have a sense of ignoring a situation. Nixon was unaffected by student protests…
> Do words evolve by mistake, or do they evolve because we need to say something and we don't have the right word for it?
Both, I believe. See also linguistic descriptivism versus prescriptivism. And the words cromulent and embiggen.
Re: What's Going on with ‘Nonplussed’? (2017)
#129Bemused (https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/can-bemuse-mean-amus...) is another word that is often understood "incorrectly".
Re: What's Going on with ‘Nonplussed’? (2017)
#130I knew it! Context clues typically imply the ("wrong") meaning, so I misinterpreted this word for a while until I used it out loud, and my pedantic family corrected me. But so many usages of the word are vague, and the difference between "perplexed" and "ambivalent" is not super important in most stories. (Whoever is nonplussed is not likely to take action on the situation.) I had a feeling that some authors were usi…
Funny. In my head, nonplussed was near-synonymous with unimpressed. So in my interpretation they were neither not paying attention, nor in over their head -- but the blank stare remains nonetheless. That still closer to your interpretation than "baffled, perplexed" as it apparently originally meant.