This blog was linked to a while ago in a Reddit discussion of uninterested and disinterested. (My opinion on them is that uninterested is restricted to the “unconcerned” meaning, while disinterested can mean either “unconcerned” or “impartial”, and that’s an opinion based on both historical and modern usage. In fact, despite the dire cries that people are causing the two words to smear together, it actually looks like the distinction between them is growing over time.)
The reason I bring this up again is that one of the Redditors was proposing that having a strong distinction could make sense, because:
“Some people draw a distinction between disinterested and uninterested. There is nothing to lose and perhaps subtlety to be gained by using that distinction yourself. Therefore observing the distinction should always be recommended.”
But I’ve already asked my question about this in the title: is there really nothing to lose? Is there no cost to maintaining a strict distinction between words? Or, more generally, is there no cost to maintaining a grammar rule?
Well, in a myopic sense, no, there’s nothing much to lose by having the rule. In the case of uninterested and disinterested, it would be hard to argue that not being able to use disinterested to mean “unconcerned” is a substantial loss. It can be done, though: I, for instance, am a great lover of alliteration, and as a result, I like to have synonyms with as many different initial letters as possible. There’s a cost, small though it may be, to not having disinterested available as I’m constructing sentences. But that’s a triviality.
A more substantial consequence is that it introduces a discontinuity in the historical record. If we decide that from now on disinterested only means “impartial”, then historical and current uses of the “unconcerned” sense will be opaque to people taught the hard-and-fast rule. That’s problematic because, despite the belief of some people that this is an illiterate usage, it’s actually common even for good writers to use. This, again, isn’t a big problem; we regularly understand misused words, especially ones whose intended meanings are very close to their actual meanings. Saying that we can’t have a rule of grammar because sometimes it isn’t followed is the sort of whateverism that people accuse descriptivists of, not a reasonable concern.*
No, the true cost is a higher-level cost: the overhead of having another distinction. This might also seem trivial. After all, we have tons and tons of usage rules and distinctions, and a lexical distinction like this is really little more than remembering a definition. But let me illustrate my point with an example I recently saw on Tumblr (sorry for the illegibility):
The distinction here is well-established: affect is almost always the verb, effect almost always the noun.** Yet here we see that it is costly to maintain the distinction. First, it’s costly to remember which homophone goes in which role. Second, it’s costly to make an error, as people may mock you for it. Third, it’s very easy to get it wrong, as the replier did here.
If there were really no downside to adding an additional rule, we’d expect to see every possibly useful distinction be made. We’d expect, for instance, to have a clear singular/plural second-person distinction in English (instead of just you). I’d expect to see an inclusive/exclusive first-person plural distinction as well, as I sometimes want to establish whether I’m saying we to include the person I’m speaking to or not. The subjunctive wouldn’t be disappearing, nor would whom.
But all distinctions are not made. In fact, relatively few of the possible distinctions we could make at the word level are made. And that suggests that even if the reasons I’ve listed for not maintaining a lot of distinctions aren’t valid, there must be something that keeps us from making all the distinctions we could make.
So next time someone says “there oughta be a rule”, think about why there isn’t. Rules aren’t free, and only the ones whose benefits outweigh their costs are going to be created and maintained. The costs and benefits change over time, and that’s part of why languages are forever changing.
–
*: Of course, if the distinction is regularly violated, then it’s hardly whateverist to say that it doesn’t exist.
**: Affect is a noun in psychology, effect a verb meaning “to cause” that is largely reviled by prescriptivists.
8 comments
Comments feed for this article
November 1, 2012 at 1:09 pm
Mike Pope
Is “effect” as a verb reviled by prescriptivists even if it’s used in the sense of “to bring about”? I thought it was only the confusion with “affect” that brought out the pitchforks. (?()
November 1, 2012 at 1:25 pm
Eugene
I think it’s great that the reply was wrong on both the usage and the politics ; ). It’s true that the results of the election could effect great changes in my life. My mood, and eventually my affect, could be affected as well.
November 1, 2012 at 2:04 pm
Jonathon Owen
I have a theory that maintaining useful distinctions boils down to simple mental economics. With disinterested/uninterested, we lack intuition about which word should mean what, so the distinction is arbitrary and must simply be learned. There has to be a mental cost to that.
And since, as you say, we’re usually pretty good at figuring out intended meaning, there’s not much to be gained by investing in learning it, especially when most people aren’t learning it to begin with. No matter how precisely a given person might use the two words, they’ll still have to be flexible when interpreting others’ usage. The payout isn’t worth the investment.
Where serious misunderstanding is a real possibility, speakers will naturally invest in maintaining distinctions, because we don’t like to be misunderstood.
November 1, 2012 at 5:57 pm
Richard Hershberger
The argument for the distinction amounts to that if we all just started making this distinction consistently, then we would accrue some benefit greater than the cost. Let us stipulate for the sake of discussion that this is true. The problem is with the implementation. If I,the reader, know that the particular writer I am reading makes a strict distinction between ‘uninterested’ and ‘disinterested’ then I know what he means when he writes “John was disinterested in the game.” But if many writers don’t maintain this distinction so carefully, then I have to keep track of which writers do and do not, which seems rather a lot of effort, even apart from writers I don’t know well enough to tell. From the writer’s perspective, it is unlikely that all his readers will know he keeps this distinction, so if he truly wishes to be clear he will need to provide other clues to his meaning. This rather makes the careful distinction pointless.
History has shown that usage advice/harangues are an ineffective way to establish distinctions firmly enough that they stand on their own. Centuries of this hasn’t stopped “less” from being applied to count nouns. Much of the advice seems to include an implicit assumption that the advice will be universally implemented overnight. In the real world, all this usage advice does is create shibboleths: reasons to complain and to denigrate others, but nothing for actually increasing the clarity of the language. A cynic might suspect that the complaining and denigration are the real point.
November 2, 2012 at 4:30 pm
linguischtick
I don’t think important distinction is between those two full word forms (uninterested vs. disinterested) but rather between the prefixes. How many other pairs of words in English are different only by those prefixes? They both have a meaning of “negation” and the fact that it’s rare to contrast dis-X with un-X might make it particularly hard to remember the difference.
This is just an intuition, but I think that dis goes on verbs and un goes on adjectives and that’s why it’s uncommon to find contrasts. You don’t get pairs like unimportant/*disimportant because important is an adjective, but you can have pairs like disable/unable since the former is a verb and the latter is an adjective.
November 4, 2012 at 9:20 am
Warsaw Will
@Eugene – and the punctuation; it’s a triple whammy – First off its [sic] “effect” – (which is why I didn’t see the error in the first place). Is there not a named law that says that people who comment to criticise other peoples’s spelling or grammar invariably make mistakes themselves.
November 5, 2012 at 3:15 pm
Eugene
If the noun, effect, had stress on the first syllable, as the noun, affect, does, people might have an easier time keeping things straight. With the verbs, the second syllable is stressed so the vowel in the first syllable is reduced. It’s going to be difficult to maintain that distinction since the two words would be pronounced essentially the same. So the error is really just a spelling mistake.
@ Warsaw Will: I suppose it is more or less like the its/it’s problem.
December 8, 2012 at 10:13 am
ambermartingale
Reblogged this on Amber Martingale's Blog.