The English language has developed haphazardly. Drawing on diverse sources, it has spawned as rich a vocabulary as any known language. The chaos Johnson found, and tried to tidy up, includes many words that have sprung from the same source with meanings that are related but different. For example, frail and fragile both come from the Latin fragilis. They are not synonyms for each other even though they share the same central idea. "A frail old man bought a fragile old vase" sounds right. Reverse the adjectives, and the resulting sentence would sound distinctly odd. Similarly, we have many words that sound similar but come from different roots and have different, albeit similar, meanings; and we have words from the same root differentiated by various prefixes or suffixes.

Also See in TVR: Nice Distinctions by Julian Burnside

Generally, the distinctions between these approximate twins are useful. English has thousands of them: they account in part for its richness and subtlety. Unfortunately, some of these useful distinctions are being rubbed away by careless handling. As the process continues, the language loses a little of its power and subtlety.

Precious (at least to lawyers) is the distinction between disinterested and uninterested. A person is uninterested in a thing if it holds no interest for him; if he prefers to give his attention to other things. So, I am interested in music and sculpture, but I am uninterested in golf and stamp-collecting. To be disinterested, however, is to have no stake in the subject matter. Judges should be interested in cases they decide, but they must be disinterested in them. Increasingly, the two words are used interchangeably. It is now unsafe to say disinterested unless you are confident that your intended audience will understand the true meaning. An important distinction is being lost.

Another casualty of the process is the distinction between incredible and incredulous. Incredible is the condition of not being believable. Incredulous is the state of mind that does not believe something. The Australian Prime Minister, Mr. Howard, asserted in the lead up to the November 2001 election that he was unaware that reports of asylum seekers throwing their children overboard at sea were untrue. That assertion was incredible; many people were incredulous that he persisted with it. What is incredible often induces incredulity; the fact that the two things frequently go hand in hand probably explains the confusion. Facts are incredible (not believable); people are incredulous (not believing).

The battle to save reticent from a takeover by reluctant is probably lost. A person who is reluctant is unwilling, struggles against a thing, resists it. By contrast, a person who is reticent is reserved, silent, disinclined to speak. Reluctant comes from re + luctare (to struggle). Reticent comes from re + tacere (to be silent).

Another two words often confused for each other are interpolate and interrupt. Interrupt comes from the Latin rumpere (to break). With the prefix, it has the obvious meaning break in upon, or break off. Interpolate is more subtle, and extends beyond mere interruption. Originally, it meant to polish up, from polire (to polish), from which we also get polite and policy. It soon came to signify altering a book by adding material, especially by adding spurious material. So it was from the mid-seventeenth century to the late nineteenth century. But from the late eighteenth century, mathematicians had been using it in a more neutral sense. Mathematicians use it to signify the completion of a series of numbers by the introduction of numbers in the unfilled intermediate positions by calculating from those numbers already known. The gravitational pull of scientific use slowly influenced the lay use; so in ordinary speech, it came to mean any words, comment, or observation inserted in the middle of other material. It has lost its pejorative connotation although it may still involve an interruption that is ill-mannered by reason of bad timing.

Another fading distinction — a battle almost certainly lost — is the distinction between surprise and astonish. Surprise comes from sur + prehendere (literally, over + take hold of). Originally, it meant to overpower the mind or will; then to attack suddenly, or to capture by force; then to come on unexpectedly, to take unawares; then to affect with the emotion of being taken unawares, which approximates its current principal meaning. Astonish is cognate with stun, but its intensity has gradually diminished: originally, it meant to stun, paralyze, or deaden; then to stun mentally, then to dismay, then to shock. The Coverdale Bible (1535) has "Be astonished (o ye heauens), be afrayde, and abashed at soch a thinge" (Jeremiah II 12); the King James version (1611) has "The people were astonished at his doctrine" (Matthew vii 28). The distinction between surprise and astonish, at least as lexicographers would have it, is best captured in a story (no doubt apocryphal) about the great lexicographer and pedagogue Noah Webster. It is said that his wife found him embracing their maid. She said, "Noah, I am surprised." He replied, "No. You are astonished, it is we who are surprised."

Astonish may have lost some of its original force, but it is still a strong word. The language needs a word for a similar emotion at a lower pitch. Surprise does the job. The distinction remains only in the story about Webster, and he died in 1843. In 1844, Macaulay had written, "Weymouth had a natural eloquence, which sometimes astonished those who knew how little he owed to study." This deftly ambiguous insult suggests that the distinction had all but disappeared by the time Webster had died.

Confusion between dysfunctional and nonfunctional probably comes from the attraction (irresistible to some writers) of new and important-sounding words. Dysfunctional crawled out of the swamp of social science jargon. Its apparent meaning seemed obvious enough, and it quickly became a desirable substitute for the dowdy, familiar nonfunctional. Nonfunctional simply means not able to function; broken; unserviceable. Dysfunctional means functioning badly, functioning in a manner abnormal, or not intended. The distinction is real and useful and should be preserved, if only to spare us a replacement neologism from the social scientists.

The same tendency of some writers to prefer the important-sounding word where it is available probably explains the recent vogue of epicenter. When writers wish to place a thing more emphatically at the center of events, they often refer to it as being "at the epicenter." This is plainly wrong, and means quite the opposite of what is intended. The epicenter is not some mysteriously intensified form of centrality. On the contrary, the epicenter is never at the center of a thing. The word comes from seismology, where it is used to identify the point on the earth's surface immediately above the center of a seismic event. By definition, the epicenter is above the true center: often many miles above it. The Greek prefix epi- means upon, and is used in many technical words that, because of their obscurity, have avoided the careless treatment received by epicenter.

Julian Burnside