What’s Interesting About ‘Disinterested’

History is so annoying.

Just when you gird your loins to pen an eloquent article about the fine distinctions of language, threading your way among the thickets of the prescriptivist debate to request that we all pause to acknowledge what might be lost when such distinctions collapse, history comes along and thumbs its snotty nose at you. I refer to the difference in meaning accorded the adjectives disinterested and uninterested, of which the noun forms are (or should be) disinterest and uninterest.

Fussbudgets like me bristle whenever we hear disinterested used when we think the appropriate term is uninterested. (As with the tendency to use less rather than fewer, the reverse seems never to hold true.)

Recent examples from the news:

Education is treated by the Pakistani state as a series of inputs: dysfunctional school buildings, and underqualified and disinterested teachers.

A Mutual Disinterest for Michigan and Harbaugh

Giddy with disinterest. Tingling with unconscious ennui. Quivering with apathy. I’d say the public mood is paradoxical. (David Brooks)

Emma Howard noted the affable centenarian’s charming disinterest in his growing celebrity.

No matter that this turn of phrase is too new by about 25 years: It bluntly encapsulates Sybil’s disinterest in her old life. (Ben Zimmer on Downton Abbey)

. . . a new American determination to work with a “light footprint” that can give the impression of disinterest. (Roger Cohen)

A disinterested person, to those who gripe about this sort of thing, means an impartial person; an uninterested person is an indifferent, bored, or otherwise unconcerned person. Two very different meanings, with a wide opening for a gray area. When a sports headline reads Disinterest Bothers Calipari, a failure to maintain the distinction between the two meanings renders the headline vague. A few more steps down the road, and the intriguing opening line of a 1982 book review—In reviewing the work of William Golding, I can declare the ultimate disinterest—the disinterest of absolute uncertainty—could leave tomorrow’s readers scratching their heads over the relationship between uncertainty and unconcern.

When I began this post, I thought I’d focus only on the problem with the noun form of the two words. After all, in my first example above, there’s no reason that underqualified and disinterested teachers can’t be corrected to underqualified and uninterested teachers; but the impression of disinterest would have to be corrected to the impression of lack of interest. One can appreciate a writer’s avoiding the stacked prepositional phrasing. Moreover, the noun form, when it means unconcern, almost always precedes or implies the preposition in, whereas a noun meaning impartiality would precede as to or some similar phrase—so we have a giveaway in the context.

That, I thought, would be my point, such as it is. But then I looked into the history, and everything got tangled up. Merriam-Webster claims that disinterest originally meant lack of interest and uninterest meant impartiality—the opposite of the prescriptivist meaning today. But the OED cites 1658 as the first instance of disinterest meaning impartiality and 1889 as the first instance of its meaning unconcern. Checking on the adjective form, we find a closer entangling of the two meanings: Though I found myself reading the several examples of disinterested furnished by the OED from the 17^th century as indicating impartiality, the OED editors assigned them almost equally to unconcerned or impartial. The first absolutely clear instance of disinterested meaning unconcerned occurs in 1928.

The problem, I realized, is not with dis- and un-, which are both prefixes negating the word to which they attach. The problem lies with the word interest. Among its many meanings are the quality of being engaged by something—let’s call this meaning A—and a share or concern in a property, enterprise, group, etc.—let’s call this meaning B. Mixing up these meanings, it could make sense to say I am uninterested (A) in a company in which I hold a large interest (B). Or to say that I have a disinterested opinion (B) about something that interests me a great deal (A). If we get confused about the root of the word, it’s no wonder we get a little confused about the prefixed version.

Well, no one ever promised us that language would always make unambiguous sense. Meanwhile, speaking of interests—only a few interested readers responded disinterestedly to the MooT quiz, but from this tiny sampling, it’s clear we rank several questions easier than MooT does. Moreover, we disagree both with the game and with each other. MooT assigned the questions I posed the following answers and difficulty rankings:

1. Gluon. Green (sort of easy)
2. The honeymoon. Blue (hard)
3. The vista. Red (easy)
4. Half-baked. Yellow (sort of hard)
5. The sullen. Green (sort of easy)
6. Yiddish. Yellow (sort of hard)

Only one reader assigned two of the same categories as MooT, and two readers disagreed in every category. Interesting, huh?