WOTD: Pseudo-intellectual

Today’s Word of the Day is:

pseudo-intellectual

• One who feigns the marks of superior intelligence: their use of advanced vocabulary is out of context or they acquire possessions considered intellectual.

Source

For example, a pseudo-intellectual might commit one or both of the following mistakes:

“Nonplussed” comes from the Latin non plus, meaning “no more,” which landed almost intact in English as “nonplus,” meaning “a state in which no more can be said or done.” The standard definition of “nonplussed” is “bewildered, confused or perplexed.” Got that?

“Nonplussed” should not be used to describe people who are calm during earthquakes, speakers who remain poised when confronted with hecklers, or zoo animals that aren’t aware that video footage showing them playing with dog toys is on CNN.com’s most viewed list.

Moreover, there is no such thing as the word “plussed” (unless you’re one of those people who talks about mathematics in terms of “plussing and minusing,” which I personally stopped doing in college) and, even if there were, do you really think it would mean “fazed”? Would someone really say, “When I spotted Lindsay Lohan at Applebee’s, I was so plussed I could barely finish my Mini Chicken Ranchers.”

Unlikely. But in the realm of vocabulary blunders committed by those who should know better, nonplussed is nonpareil. The improper use of “nonplussed” has managed to infiltrate not just everyday speech but any number of books and articles that were presumably copy-edited by someone other than the author’s stoned roommate.

Is it possible that the real “nonplussed” has become a casualty of its own vernacular groundswell? Maybe it’s fed up with all that puzzlement and ready to settle down into a quiet, unfazed life? Or, like a person who’s born one gender but is completely convinced that he’s really the other, perhaps “nonplussed” is simply transitioning into its authentic self.

I posed some of these possibilities to Mark Liberman, a linguistics professor at the University of Pennsylvania and the founder of a linguistics blog called Language Log.

…

Liberman notes that the “unfazed” meaning, which he calls the “new meaning,” has already made it into the online dictionary Encarta, which lists “cool and collected; calm and unperturbed” as the second definition (right under “confused”).

In other words, it’s dictionary survival of the fittest at work; may the best definition win, or at least the one that triumphs through proliferation. Consider “peruse,” which technically means “to read with thoroughness and care” but in today’s parlance has come to mean “pretending to skim magazines while waiting for someone you met on the Internet to meet you at the bookstore.” It’s a little perverse that one thing can morph into something like its opposite, but it would mean “nonplussed” isn’t a victim of plebeian misappropriation but, rather, an agent of change.

As it turns out, it is popular among those who see themselves as such. It so happens that in a People magazine interview last month, presidential hopeful Barack Obama commented on his daughters’ response to media scrutiny by saying “I’ve been really happy by how nonplussed they’ve been by the whole thing.”

Et tu, Obama?

Source

And more recently:

ENORMITY

Americans have no direct equivalent of our British Queen’s English, the perceived standard of correctness in writing and speaking, though it has been pointed out that even the Queen doesn’t speak the Queen’s English any more, her language having been overtaken by generational changes in vocabulary and pronunciation.

The closest equivalent in the US is the usage of highly educated people such as Barack Obama. So it was a shock for some people to hear one word elbow its way out of his acceptance speech in Grant Park, Chicago, late on election day on 4 November 2008: “I know you didn’t do this just to win an election and I know you didn’t do it for me. You did it because you understand the enormity of the task that lies ahead.”

Did he use the wrong word? Many style guides say firmly that he could only have employed it for something monstrously wicked, an implication that even the staunchest Republican could not have taken from it. He just meant that rebuilding America was going to be a big job, monstrous figuratively but not in its moral dimension.

Style guides suggest that, when great size or extent is meant, the rather clunky and not especially common enormousness would be better. It and enormity both come from the Latin root enormis, which is a compound of e, out, plus norma, a carpenter’s set square or pattern (it’s also the origin of normal). So something described as enormis might in a literal sense be out of true or misshapen, though its usual meaning in Latin was a transgression or deviation from legal or moral rectitude. The word came over into English via French as enorm and only later split into the two nouns enormity and enormousness.

Both began life with much the same meaning as enorm, and for a while both were used in the same sense, for something that was unusual or strikingly irregular, so out of the ordinary it was monstrous or outrageous. Both took on the idea of great physical size only around the end of the eighteenth century. That this was incorrect usage in the case of enormity began to be asserted by commentators only at the end of the nineteenth century. An early example is in the Oxford English Dictionary’s entry for enormity, dated 1893, in which Henry Bradley, editor of the letter E, wrote that its sense of hugeness or vastness “is now regarded as incorrect”.

That’s still true, and good writers find another word when they want to say that a thing is merely physically big; a phrase such as “the enormity of the pyramids” is widely thought wrong. But a more subtle link to great size often appears, which critics mistake for a literal reference. Writers find it to be the right word for matters that are conceptually huge or figuratively enormous, especially something that’s overwhelming in its immensity or its implications.

So can we use enormity as Obama did? Yes, we can.

If he did, that means that “figuratively speaking” the task ahead will be “huge” and “overwhelming in its immensity or its implications,” and that all might be true indeed. However, Obama’s “Call to Service” implies more than just metaphors and figurative language. No, it’s clear he misused the word.

Filed under: WOTD