things kevin hates

Let’s suppose you’re somewhere you don’t want to be. You’re bored out of your mind. Are you disinterested? No! You’re uninterested. Those are two completely different words, but people have been horribly misusing “disinterested” to mean “uninterested.” This online dictionary entry includes a note from the American Heritage Dictionary, whose Usage Panel* highly disapproves of using “disinterested” to mean “uninterested.” However, that same note also notes that “disinterested” once meant “uninterested,” back in the 17th century; then it fell out of fashion, but came back in the 20th century. So we can’t just use history as a guide here, since history has done different things with this word at different times.

I can understand the difficulties in dealing with “disinterested.” The prefixes “dis-” and “un-” aren’t all that different in meaning. What “disinterested” and “uninterested” do is use two very different meanings of the word “interested”; one means “having or showing curiosity, fascination, or concern”; the other means “possessing a right, claim, or stake.” (Link here.) The second usage is much less common and seems to come up more in a technical legal or financial sense than in common English usage; its rarity leads to the running together of “uninterested” and “disinterested” as “bored.”

I realize that we all walk a fine line between prescriptivism and descriptivism; sometimes I’ll stick out my neck for new or unusual usages of the English language, but I usually tend toward good old-fashioned prescriptivism, and that’s what I have to do here. In “disinterested” and “uninterested” we have two perfectly good words that mean two very different things. Changing the meaning of “disinterested” just muddies things up. If they’re going to mean the same thing, we may as well throw them both out and stick with “impartial” and “bored.”

* An interesting bunch; the New York Times has an article about them here. I think American Heritage Dictionary needs to sign me up for the Usage Panel ASAP. I would love having that kind of power.