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February 2010Just Foolin' AroundLast month, Senator John McCain's 2008 campaign aide Steve Schmidt described Sarah Palin as "very calm—nonplussed" when she first got the news that she had been tapped as McCain's choice for vice president. People puzzled by that description made nonplussed one of the most looked-up words in the Online Dictionary for a couple of days. Was Palin peaceful, as the context of the quotation implies, or perplexed, which is the generally accepted meaning of nonplussed? This confusion may be the result of a kind of sense drift: a word was used to mean something other than what the dictionary says it means. Schmidt may have confused nonplussed with nonchalant, and perhaps his misspeaking will help nudge nonplussed into the pantheon of terms whose established senses are sometimes contradictory. Perplexed? Think of fulsome and peruse, words whose meanings must be deduced from context. Other such ambiguous terms include notorious, bimonthly, and perhaps moot. Ambiguity, in each case, stems from a given word having senses that seem to be at odds with each other. The word momentarily, for instance, is used to mean both "for a moment" and "in a moment." Check out the dictionary take on these words – and we'd add enormity, literally, and hopefully, since all three entries have helpful usage paragraphs. |