What is a moot point?
I can’t think of a time I’ve seen it used to mean anything other than “previously decided” or “debatable only as an academic exercise”. And yet I’ve recently been encountering people claiming that this is wrong, wrong, WRONG, and that moot in fact means quite the opposite: a point that is open for meaningful debate. A representative example of this claim from the recent “20 Common Grammar Mistakes that (Almost) Everyone Makes” article*:
“Contrary to common misuse, ‘moot’ doesn’t imply something is superfluous. It means a subject is disputable or open to discussion. e.g., The idea that commercial zoning should be allowed in the residential neighborhood was a moot point for the council.”
Of course, if (almost) everyone misuses a word the same way, then it’s probably not a misuse. But setting that point aside, if moot really means the opposite of how it’s normally used, how could that have happened?
Let’s start the answer by noting that non-American English speakers might be wondering what I’m going on about. It seems that moot means something different depending on which side of the Atlantic it’s being used on. A little history: the OED reports that adjectival moot arose in legal parlance to describe hypothetical cases used as practice for law students. Thus the earliest meaning of moot referred to a debate without practical consequences, whether because the case was hypothetical or because it was a real case that had already been decided.**
Between the emergence of adjectival moot in the 1500s and modern times, its meaning spread out in two directions. One is that of American English: a point that is unrelated to law, is debatable, and whose debate has no practical consequences. Whether I should have been so enamored of The Juliana Theory’s “Into the Dark” when it was on heavy radio rotation in 2000 is a moot point, because I can’t go back and tell my younger self that the song was maudlin emo crap. But it’s also a debatable topic, because my interest in that song got me to seek out their album, which had better songs and which later led me to find out about a split EP containing Dawson High’s song “Port Matilda”, which had a huge influence on my artistic sensibilities throughout college. Points can be made on either side, but the decision can’t change.
The other direction in which moot spread was to a point that was just generally open for debate, whether or not it had practical consequences. This is what’s being claimed above to be the “correct” meaning, but here the author’s running afoul of our curious American tendency to confuse the British usage (which is what it is) for the correct usage. In my experience with American English, it’s at least the much less common meaning if not non-standard.
Of course, the two meanings are not very far apart. A point that some of the complainants overlook about the American meaning is that while the debate doesn’t matter, the point is still debatable. Sometimes it may not feel this way; Lynne Murphy cites an old Saturday Night Live sketch “The Question is Moot”, where Jesse Jackson is a game show host who repeatedly interrupts his contestants’ answers by declaring that the question is moot — i.e., unworthy of debate or speculation.
But this, crucially, does not mean that it could not be debated. It doesn’t work for points that are settled and beyond debate. Don’t these sentences sound strange?
(1a) ?Whether cats built the Sphinx is a moot point.
(1b) ?It’s a moot point whether Wayne’s World inspired Bridge Over the River Kwai.***
There is one sense of moot that I haven’t touched on yet. Looking through COCA, I found this example:
“It shrank a bit, though its generous size should make the reduction moot.”
This seems to be a recently emerging meaning, for an undeniable but negligible matter. As far as I know, this is limited to predicative usages (e.g., the reduction was moot but not *the moot reduction). And maybe that’s what all this fuss is about, but I don’t think so.
Lastly, the word is moot, not mute. The standard pronunciation rhymes with boot. The pronunciation may be slowly moving toward mute, but at the moment, rhymes-with-boot is the dominant pronunciation in Standard American English.
—
*: For expert deconstruction of this article, see Arnold Zwicky and Stan Carey.
**: If we consider the nominal moot as well, it goes back to Old English and could refer to a non-hypothetical court as well; a moot was any assembly of people, but especially one with judicial purposes. The OED notes that this usage persists, but I think it has to be restricted to British (or at least non-American) Englishes, because all the contemporary occurrences sound like nonsense to me.
***: In case you worry that the oddness of these sentences stems from the oddness of their topics, compare with That cats built the Sphinx is an idiotic notion, which sounds fine to me.
Motivated Grammar 
17 comments
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April 12, 2012 at 11:09 am
Mike Aubrey
Lastly, the word is moot, not mute. The standard pronunciation rhymes with boot. The pronunciation may be slowly moving toward mute, but at the moment, rhymes-with-boot is the dominant pronunciation in Standard American English.
That smells like an eggcorn.
April 12, 2012 at 11:55 am
johnwcowan
It’s been a long time since the neighbors “deemed dooms [judgments] in a moot hall.”
April 12, 2012 at 1:54 pm
Kemp
I’m British, and I’ve never heard of what you refer to as the British meaning of the word. Maybe it’s our exposure to American TV and movies, but I’ve always known moot to refer to a point that, debatable or not, has no real impact on anything.
April 12, 2012 at 3:05 pm
dw
I spent the first 20+ years of my life in England, and, like Kemp, I am only familiar with the “American” meaning of the word.
Do you have any citations for the alleged British meaning?
April 12, 2012 at 4:38 pm
the ridger
I believe this is simple semantic drift, from a point that needs discussion to a point that can be discussed but to no purpose. Fighting the rearguard action against semantic shift attracts a lot of people who simply refuse to understand that it’s a forlorn cause.
April 12, 2012 at 7:15 pm
Bill Davis
I loved the Friends episode where Joey and Rachel have this exchange:
Joey: All right, Rach. The big question is, “does he like you?” All right? Because if he doesn’t like you, this is all a moo point.
Rachel: Huh. A moo point?
Joey: Yeah, it’s like a cow’s opinion. It just doesn’t matter. It’s moo.
Rachel: Have I been living with him for too long, or did that all just make sense?
April 12, 2012 at 9:36 pm
Flesh-eating Dragon
Don’t know if you saw my comments about this under Stan Carey’s March 21 blog post, but here’s a summary. For some reason Australian dictionaries generally record only the “debatable” sense (at least in pocket editions) which is odd because in my experience that sense is not used here — we only use the “academic” sense. This bugs me.
Incidentally, the “academic” sense obviously has some currency in Britain, as shown by an example I gave from a book by Ian Stewart (which I had re-read recently at the time.) “The stability of a Newtonian Solar System is beside the point when the currently interesting one obeys Einstein’s laws, not Newton’s. And anyway, atomic theory says that the sun will eventually blow up, making the long-term future of heliocentric planetary motion, either Newtonian or Einsteinian, moot.”
You mention a third meaning (“previously decided”), without explaining how it fits in. We don’t use that here either, so far as I know.
April 13, 2012 at 1:58 am
Tabea
Thank you for writing this article! It was quite interesting. But I’m actually commenting to make a suggestion: Why don’t you add a “Summary” paragraph in the end all the time? That’s actually one of my favorite things about your posts (apart from the content, of course).
April 13, 2012 at 3:55 am
Narmitaj
As a Brit, I definitely use “It’s a moot point” to mean something that, whether important or not, is future-oriented and subject to debate or otherwise yet to be decided, say through experience (as in “Whether Turkey has the capability to take on the Kurds without Syrian army help is a moot point.”.
I take it it has its Anglo-Saxon origin along with things like moots, folkmoots and the Witanegemot, institutions where real-life issues were debated. I gather from Wikipedia Witanagemot is a term now seen by some mediaeval historians as of dubious value and even a Victorian coinage, though personally I vaguely remember writing a second-year history essay in the 1970s on it as a precursor to the English parliament.
I know of the American usage of “moot point” as something argued in a debate of only academic or even hypothetical interest, and see it often on US blogs. But I often read “the point is moot” as an American term generally meaning irrelevant rather than in anyway debatable, as in “Rumour has it that she was lured into this profession to be surrounded by rockstars, but so far no rockstar has ever visited the town of BoingBoing, hence the point is moot.”
Generally I can figure it out the meaning from context when reading, but whenever I write “moot point” myself (and never “the point is moot”) I mean it in that British sense of being relevant, debatable and as yet undecided. I think these days I would take care to write something along the lines of: “this has been decided on, and that has been rejected, but this other is still a moot point and worth thrashing out”.
Or I would avoid it altogether these days!
April 13, 2012 at 4:21 am
Stan
I like semantic drift: it’s so interesting yet reviled! Have you found much evidence for the third sense you mention, with moot appearing to mean “negligible”?
By the way, the discussion Adrian refers to, about the drift of moot in different parts of the world, begins here.
April 13, 2012 at 4:56 am
Abbie
One of the many, many words I learned as a kid from context in Calvin and Hobbes…
April 13, 2012 at 1:19 pm
Warsaw Will
I’m also British, and in contrast to Kemp, the only meaning I’ve ever known until today is in the expression ‘a moot point’, i.e. something that is debatable. Oxford Dictonary Online gives two meanings, the one I know – ‘subject to debate, dispute, or uncertainty’, and a second, which they describe as North American usage – ‘having little or no practical relevance’. And Chambers gives – ‘open to argument; debatable’. So as far as I’m concerned, Gabe was absolutely right and this meaning of ‘debatable’ is standard British usage. Perhaps it’s a generation thing.
April 13, 2012 at 1:40 pm
Richard Hershberger
One way I have seen “moot” used in actual law practice (as contrasted with law school pedagogy) is for a point which, while not itself having been decided, is no longer relevant. For example, one party in a lawsuit makes a discovery request of another party. This is, in theory, due within a fix period such as thirty days. In practice the reply frequently is late. If seriously overdue, the party owed discovery might file a Motion to Compel its production. If granted, the court then orders its production within a fixed time. If it is still not produced, the next step is a Motion for Sanctions. Now suppose that the requested material is finally produced, subsequent to the Motion for Sanctions is filed but before the motion is ruled on. The producing party would file an Opposition to the Motion for Sanctions, stating that the items have finally been produced. The judge, unless he is pissed off for some reason (and this alone would not typically be reason enough) might deny the Motion for Sanctions as being “moot”. The question at hand has not, strictly speaking, been previous decided. The question at hand is whether sanctions should be granted. But the underlying purpose of the whole dreary exercise is for the discovery process to proceed, and this purpose has been achieved. So the mootness is a further step removed from the previously decided issue.
April 23, 2012 at 12:34 am
Dan M.
Adding to Richard Hershberger’s comment, I believe that I’ve even heard or seen “moot” in this sense verbed, as in “The respondants having conceded this particular point moots the plaintiff’s argument that…”.
May 7, 2012 at 3:01 pm
wgd
Brit usage example: “…the Beatles’ sons have mooted the idea of starting a band.”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2012/apr/04/beatles-next-generation-possibility-mccartney
May 8, 2012 at 9:35 am
Gabe
Everyone: Thanks for all the comments! It’s pretty neat how almost everyone has one or the other meaning of “moot”, and very few people are even aware of the other meaning (myself included). I’m reminded of the “no end” vs. “to no end” discussion a few years ago.
I’m glad especially for all the examples of the non-American meanings, as well as the verbal forms, because those are totally foreign to me and I have to take your word for them.
Tabea: Hey, thanks for reminding me! I’ve resumed putting summaries on the newer posts.
May 10, 2012 at 12:31 pm
ASG
You might be interested to know that the nominal “moot” was adopted in a role-playing game in the early 90s to describe a meeting of werewolves.
http://wiki.white-wolf.com/worldofdarkness/index.php?title=Moot_%28Werewolf:_The_Apocalypse%29
Gamers often appropriate obsolete terms like this to make themselves sound more old-timey (even though Werewolf: The Apocalypse is set in the modern era).