151–160 of 337 posts
First they came for literally and I did nothing because I wasn't a pedant. 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.
As a Brit, I don't think I've ever encountered the latter meaning. I've only ever heard it to mean 'perplexed'.
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".
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wait… do Americans not say whom?
Not much. 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.
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.
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'…
As a Brit, I don't think I've ever encountered the latter meaning. I've only ever heard it to mean 'perplexed'.
Earlier 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 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.
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The "unimpressed" meaning is the primary meaning I've heard and I'm not young. They're hand-wringing over a phenomenon as old as I am, it seems.
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.