What's Going on with ‘Nonplussed’? (2017) • Hacker News Board

Re: What's Going on with ‘Nonplussed’? (2017)

#311

Post by lupire » Tue, Apr 30, 2024, 12:49 PM UTC

tsimionescu wrote: post #127

ajmurmann wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 speci…

I think that's how it started ("figuratively literally"), but not sure that modern youth know the literal meaning of literal.

As you say, its meaning extremely vulnerable to the fate it experienced, and many words have suffered the same fate: very, really, actually, ...

People who mock "misuse" of "literally" should take a good look that their own diction.

Re: What's Going on with ‘Nonplussed’? (2017)

#312

Post by lupire » Tue, Apr 30, 2024, 12:54 PM UTC

Terr_ wrote: post #213

ajmurmann wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Supposedly this has happened with "literally". Allegedly also with "factoid", which means "something which resembles a fact" versus the misuse of "a small fact". It's frustrating because it's like watching people declare that aster-oids are actual stars , except smaller. Or that human-oids and andr-oids are small people.

This can be traced to CNN Headline News in 1991, which put "factoid" in common culture.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=n13g2Ae1GiU

There it was used to mean silly facts. I'm not sure "small fact" is the common use. I'd say "I had cereal for breakfast" is a "small" fact, but not a "factoid" in that sense.

Re: What's Going on with ‘Nonplussed’? (2017)

#313

Post by lupire » Tue, Apr 30, 2024, 12:59 PM UTC

vundercind wrote: post #197

talkingtab wrote: post #78

Words 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…

> 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? Mostly the former, from what I can tell. People hear a “fancy” word, misunderstand it based on limited context, begin to use it where a less-fancy word would do (for whatever reason), and before long one cannot use the word in the original sense without being misunderstoo…

This is what militant descriptivists (and some prescriptivists) miss.

"Correct" and "incorrect" language is not the importsmant distinction.

What's important is whether a novelty of language increases or decreases expressive power. New words are better than corrupting old words, unles the old meaning is so low importance that it doesn't deserve to keep its place in the "Huffman" encoding of the language (which is, high frequency words/structures should be smaller).

Re: What's Going on with ‘Nonplussed’? (2017)

#314

Post by lupire » Tue, Apr 30, 2024, 1:04 PM UTC

SamBam wrote: post #240

bjornlouser wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what about 'moot'. Do Brits screw that up like Americans? 'moot point'

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. 1. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/moot_point

"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.

Re: What's Going on with ‘Nonplussed’? (2017)

#315

Post by lupire » Tue, Apr 30, 2024, 1:07 PM UTC

kibwen wrote: post #175

mikestew wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

Who(m) are you talking about?

It's the "m", not the sentence structure. The awkward archaic structure is a different, often comorbid, affectation among Latinophiles.

Re: What's Going on with ‘Nonplussed’? (2017)

#316

Post by lupire » Tue, Apr 30, 2024, 1:10 PM UTC

seabass-labrax wrote: post #295

jamiek88 wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, even the BBC surrendered to the Americanism.

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.

Except that it's a terrible word because milli means thousand, and ard just means a grammatical modification.

So all that accomplishes is conflating thousand with million with billion. (Of course "million" is already a conflation of "thousand"!)

Re: What's Going on with ‘Nonplussed’? (2017)

#317

Post by lupire » Tue, Apr 30, 2024, 1:13 PM UTC

seabass-labrax wrote: post #301

da_chicken wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We do, but "who" is acceptable in both tenses. There's no reason to ever use "whom" because it's the only one you can use wrong. "To whom did you give the book?" is more often "Who'd you give the book to?" complete with the similarly forbidden preposition.

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.

Re: What's Going on with ‘Nonplussed’? (2017)

#318

Post by lupire » Tue, Apr 30, 2024, 1:17 PM UTC

carabiner wrote: post #177

wongarsu wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 1: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/nonplussed

"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." Read: only dumb people use it this way.

What do you think "dumb" means?

("struck dumb" is a synonym for "nonplussed" !)

Re: What's Going on with ‘Nonplussed’? (2017)

#319

Post by lupire » Tue, Apr 30, 2024, 1:21 PM UTC

thaumasiotes wrote: post #153

impendia wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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 Spanis…

"Whom in this room would you boom?" is not ungrammatical though.

https://www.nytimes.com/1993/04/11/theater/sunday-view-party...

Re: What's Going on with ‘Nonplussed’? (2017)

#320

Post by lupire » Tue, Apr 30, 2024, 1:22 PM UTC

stavros wrote: post #183

notnaut wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What’s awesome about words is we can just say whatever bullshit we want and if anyone understands and repeats it, bam, new words! They don’t start off in the dictionary!

I love "anon" for that reason. "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".

Works the same if you don't say "anon" at all.