Satima's Blogspot: Common misuses

Sunday, 5 June 2011

Common misuses - confusing words

Sunday, June 05, 2011 |

Posted by Satima Flavell

Some words have two negative forms, which can be confusing. Two such words are "satisfied" and "interested". Both have two negative forms: one starting with dis- and one starting with un-. These negatives, in both cases, have very different meanings.

Dissatisfied/unsatisfied

If a person is dissatisfied, he or she is feeling upset or disappointed in some way. For instance “Cheryl was really dissatisfied with the service at her hotel.”

But someone who is unsatisfied hasn’t had enough of something: “I was still unsatisfied after the meal.” (You might say this after going to a posh restaurant where they served you miniscule piece of salmon and an artistic trail of sauce, garnished with some unidentifiable herb.)

Disinterested/uninterested

These examples show the difference:
“We need a disinterested party to adjudicate the competition” (i.e. someone who has no vested interest in the outcome. A parent of one of the competitors would not be disinterested!)

He or she might, however, be uninterested. E.g. “Our daughter likes to compete in gymnastics competitions but her father is totally uninterested.” (In the vernacular, he couldn’t give a stuff about gymnastic competitions even if his daughter is competing!

In neither case are the two negative forms interchangeable, because each has its own clearly defined meaning.

Labels: word use

4 comments:

Jo said...: A common misuse over here is ignorant. If someone behaves in a bad mannered way, they are called ignorant - I can see where the origin would be, but they way it is used is still inappropriate. Churchill said it first "two nations divided by a common language".; Sunday, June 05, 2011
Satima Flavell said...: You hear that usage here in Oz as well, Jo. Even the Oxford dictionary accepts it as informal, and it gives another usage as well: http://oxforddictionaries.com/definition/ignorant

But that definitions of Churchill's is a sound one. Several times, when I lived in America, I made an idiot of myself by misusing words that meant one thing in the UK or Oz and something else completely in the States!; Sunday, June 05, 2011
Jo said...: It seems to me that language in Australia is closer to English English that it is over here. In fact I found a lot of the usages in North Carolina were closer to what we would say. One that springs to mind, Canadians say dog leash, in the UK and NC it was lead. Mind you I haven't travelled that far in Canada, so maybe its different in BC for instance.; Sunday, June 05, 2011
Satima Flavell said...: Yes, overall I think that's true. But the Aussie dialect as I knew it 50 years ago has almost died out, to be relaced by a very generic American-influenced one. We now even pronounce the name of the county the American way, which is something like Ustrellya whereas in the olden days it was more like Oztrilya. (That's exaggerated, but it's as close as I can get to the good old-fashioned Ozzie accent without using IPA!); Monday, June 06, 2011

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Common misuses - confusing words

4 comments: