Words Come and Go...

Because usage is king in English, words come and go all the time. They change their meanings, come into fashion, fall out of fashion and so on. Some people get terribly worked up about words like "presently" when used to mean "now" rather than "soon". But I could quote you any number of excellent writers who have been using presently in that sense for years.

I suppose that having a care for precision in language inclines you to conservatism and a suspicion of change -- or what is perceived as change. Much of it is just silly, but some changes should be resisted. The increasing use of "disinterested" as a synonym for "uninterested" is one case in point. Not only are the two words not synonymous, they mean almost opposite things. To be disinterested is to be interested in something in a manner that brings you no personal gain, as with a hobby.

The key principle here is that I can think of no other word in English that carries quite the same shade and weight of meaning. So if disinterested simply doubles up for uninterested, we lose a useful word. There are plenty of useless words that we could do without -- discrete, meaning separate or distinct, is a good example -- but it seems worth fighting the good fight to save words for which there are no obvious synonyms.

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