{"id":12753,"date":"2016-06-19T07:12:27","date_gmt":"2016-06-19T13:12:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lastbestnews.com\/site\/?p=12753"},"modified":"2016-06-20T14:57:13","modified_gmt":"2016-06-20T20:57:13","slug":"prairie-lights-disinterested-well-we-do-our-best","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/2016\/06\/prairie-lights-disinterested-well-we-do-our-best\/","title":{"rendered":"Prairie Lights: Disinterested? Well, we do our best"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Jury\"<\/a>

"The Jury," by John Morgan<\/p>

If you are ever tried before a jury, you will want the jurors to be disinterested, but not uninterested.<\/p><\/div>\n

Filling out a medical form the other day, I was asked whether I had lately felt any \u201cfatigue or disinterest.\u201d<\/p>\n

I wanted to say, \u201cAs a reporter and proprietor of an online newspaper, I strive to be disinterested on a daily basis, unless I am clearly stating my opinion, and even then I hope a spirit of disinterestedness informs what I have to say.\u201d<\/p>\n

But I didn\u2019t think that would help with the diagnosis, so I merely checked \u201cno.\u201d<\/p>\n

It is a small point, anyway, nothing to get worked up about, though in election years\u2014especially in the midst of this madhouse campaign\u2014I find myself latching like a bulldog onto small points, maybe as a way of holding onto my marbles.<\/p>\n

You see, I was taught that \u201cdisinterest\u201d had only one meaning: a lack of bias or prejudice, so that a person who is disinterested<\/em> is a neutral party, someone who is, in the words of Webster\u2019s unabridged dictionary, \u201cunbiased by personal interest or advantage.\u201d<\/p>\n

For many years, however, I have avoided using the word at all. The notion that disinterest<\/em> means \u201clack of interest\u201d is now so widespread that I figured using the word correctly would only be confusing, and people would think I had made a strange blunder.<\/p>\n

After my recent run-in with the medical form, I decided to look the word up, to see if I was missing anything. I was. The entry in Webster\u2019s unabridged reminded me that English is always changing, and that concepts of right and wrong are hard to nail down.<\/p>\n

\"CapreAir_Variable\"<\/a><\/div><\/div>According to Webster\u2019s, disinterested<\/em> and uninterested<\/em> \u201cshare a confused and confusing history.\u201d In its earliest use, uninterested<\/em> meant \u201cimpartial\u201d and disinterested meant \u201cnot interested or indifferent.\u201d And by \u201cvarious developmental twists,\u201d Webster\u2019s usage note continued, disinterested<\/em> is now used in both senses while uninterested<\/em> is used almost exclusively to mean \u201cnot interested or indifferent.\u201d<\/p>\n

The latest copyright on the Webster\u2019s I\u2019m quoting was 2001, and I suspect that in the past 15 years disinterested<\/em> has rarely been used to mean \u201cimpartial.\u201d<\/p>\n

I mourn its passing but I realize there is little anyone can do about such things. There\u2019s no point in being \u201ccorrect\u201d if 95 percent of your readers think you\u2019re wrong.<\/p>\n

My sympathies, though, are with people like usage expert A.R. Orage, who wrote in 1922 that \u201cNo word in the English language is more difficult [than disinterested<\/em>] to define or better worth attempting to define. Somewhere or other in its capacious folds it contains all of the ideas of ethics and even, I should say, of religion. \u2026 I venture to say that whoever has understood the meaning of \u2018disinterestedness\u2019 is not far off understanding the goal of human culture.\u201d<\/p>\n

I\u2019m not even sure what he means, but I have read that paragraph nine or 10 times now and enjoy it more each time.<\/p>\n

As with so many things in life, you learn which battles to fight. I should be getting crankier and more inflexible with age, but I seem to be moving in the opposite direction.<\/p>\n

I still correct my daughters when they say \u201con accident,\u201d but as time goes on the distinction seems hopeless. If you are my age, there is absolutely no question that \u201cby accident\u201d is the only possible construction. But if you\u2019re under the age of 35 or 40 (based on my observation), you are probably more likely to think \u201con accident\u201d is perfectly fine.<\/p>\n

I have read various theories about why this change is occurring, but the reason hardly matters. The English still say \u201ccater for\u201d and we say \u201ccater to.\u201d When and how did we change the preposition? I don\u2019t know, but I\u2019m sure many people in England think we are barbarians for saying \u201ccater to.\u201d<\/p>\n

The \u201cright\u201d preposition sounds right because it is the one we\u2019re used to. When it changes, by what Webster\u2019s called \u201cvarious developmental twists,\u201d a new \u201cright\u201d form is established.<\/p>\n

A good writer and editor once advised me to limit my use of the word \u201cgot,\u201d saying it was almost always unnecessary. I had heard that point before and I still don\u2019t understand it.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s such a small word, such an ancient and sturdy one, so Anglo-Saxon. Somehow, I came to like it more the longer I thought about it. I was hoping Bill Bryson would have something to say about it, so I looked in the index of his book, a favorite of mine, \u201cThe Mother Tongue: English & How It Got That Way.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cGot\u201d wasn\u2019t in the index, but wait. There it was, right in the title. That was all I needed to know.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Filling out a medical form the other day, I was asked whether I had lately felt any \u201cfatigue or disinterest.\u201d I wanted to say, \u201cAs a reporter and proprietor of an online newspaper, I strive to be disinterested on a daily basis, unless I am clearly stating my opinion, and even then I hope a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":12754,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[56],"tags":[4545,4543,4544],"class_list":["post-12753","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-prairie-lights","tag-a-r-orage","tag-bill-bryson","tag-websters","prominence-top-story"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12753","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12753"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12753\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/12754"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12753"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12753"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12753"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}