Understanding the Difference: Disinterested vs Uninterested

Do you get hot under the collar if you see disinterested used to mean ‘not interested’?

If so, you might be fighting a losing, even already lost, battle.

The canon of peevery

What I will call the canon of peevery has its own sacred masterpieces of peeving. High on that list sits the uninterested vs. disinterested debate; as long ago as 1889 a US dictionary tut-tutted over the ‘incorrect’ use of disinterested:

Disinterested and uninterested are sometimes confounded in speech, though rarely in writing.

Does this still hold true today?

Let’s take a breath of fresh air, clear our lungs and stand back a step or two to see what’s going on.

Essentially, we have two meanings: a) ‘impartial & unbiased’ on one hand, and b) ‘unconcerned with or indifferent to’ on t’other. The first can be summarised as the ‘ethical’ meaning.

And we have two words – uninterested and disinterested – which have played tennis with those two meanings over several centuries.

What does history tell us?

Looking at uninterested historically, we might get a shock.  The OED fine-grains the first two meanings, both marked as obsolete, of uninterested – yes, uninterested – into ‘unbiassed, impartial’ with a date before 1646, and  ‘Free from motives of personal interest; disinterested’  with a date of 1661.

So it was that the poet William Cowper could write in a letter of June 1767, ‘You know me to be an uninterested Person,’ which nowadays the recipient could interpret like a slap across the chops.

The ‘unconcerned, indifferent’ meaning first saw the light of day in 1772 and was well enough established for Byron to use it in Canto x of his jogtrotting Don Juan, when DJ, as I shall disrespectfully call him, not long arrived in England, visits Canterbury. I just had to quote a couple of stanzas for the sheer joy of the ribaldry and his quip on the purpose of travelling:

Now there is nothing gives a man such spirits,
    Leavening his blood as cayenne doth a curry,
As going at full speed—no matter where its
    Direction be, so ’tis but in a hurry,
And merely for the sake of its own merits;
    For the less cause there is for all this flurry,
The greater is the pleasure in arriving
At the great end of travel—which is driving.

They saw at Canterbury the cathedral;
    Black Edward’s helm, and Becket’s bloody stone,
Were pointed out as usual by the bedral,
    In the same quaint, uninterested tone:—
There’s glory again for you, gentle reader! All
    Ends in a rusty casque and dubious bone,
Half-solved into these sodas or magnesias;
Which form that bitter draught, the human species.

What, then, of disinterested? Similarly, or, rather, oppositely, the OED’s 1896 entry places its earliest citation for disinterested in the meaning ‘not interested, unconcerned’, which, it warns, is ‘Often regarded as a loose use’. It dates that use to before 1631 from the pen of no less a luminary than John Donne in his paradoxical and risky defence of suicide, Βιαθανατος [Biathanatos]. A Declaration of That Paradoxe, or Thesis, That Selfe-Homicide Is Not So Naturally Sinne, That It May Never Be Otherwise (which he made damn sure never saw the light of day in his lifetime, given its iconoclastic and heretical content). I confess, though, that in the citation supplied, it’s not immediately obvious that -the meaning is ‘unconcerned’, but the compilers will no doubt have examined a broader context:

If there be cases, wherein the party is dis-interested, and only or primarily the glory of God is respected and advanced, it [sc. suicide] may be lawfull.

Disinterested in its ethical meaning comes a little later and is first cited from 1659 in the work of Obadiah Walker, Master of University College Oxford, educator, writer and cleric, whose ghost, incidentally, is reputed to haunt staircase 8 of the college:

The soul… sits now as the most disinterested Arbiter, and impartial judge of her own works, that she can be.

Ambiguity?

Freud tells us ‘Neurosis is the inability to tolerate ambiguity.’ Hmm. I wonder how that applies to language.

Be that as it may, if something in the canon of peevery is to have legs, I suggest two possible justifications: the risk of ambiguity and the danger of cliché. In any case, ambiguity can surely apply only to the Janus-faced disinterested, not to uninterested, with its –  now – only single meaning. I can’t see how the second could apply to it, but is there any danger of the first? In other words, could disinterested be wrongly interpreted as meaning ‘indifferent, unconcerned’ when ‘impartial’ is meant?

How to find evidence of that, anyway? One method might be to compare the other words each of our word rivals regularly associates with. The corpus Oxford University Press graciously allows me to use lets me do just that. Incidentally, there’s not much difference between them in terms of frequency, with disinterested at 17,785 examples and uninterested at 19,167.

As I should have expected, of course, context – that is, the near environment of either word – will generally help avoid ambiguity. To explain, let’s look at a couple of patterns the two words do or don’t share. First, the pattern A and/or B.

Dispassionate occurs only with disinterested, e.g. ‘Still less does it [China] accept the practices of disinterested and dispassionate academic inquiry to which British universities still try to cling, if less tenaciously than they once did.’

But the two words ‘share’ several adjectives in this pattern, such as apathetic, disengaged, lazy, lethargic, bored, unmotivated, unengaged, etc. All those mentioned point to disinterested meaning ‘not interested’. And for all, disinterested is more frequent than uninterested.

I did wonder if aloof, which also goes with both, might be the exception that proves the rule. After all, a judge – of the old school, anyway, before human rights warped everyone’s minds – could be magisterially aloof and judiciously impartial. But no, in conjunction with aloof, distinterested in its 39 iterations always means simply ‘not interested’.

In the second pattern, the combination of each with a noun – e.g. disinterested shareholders –seems mostly straightforward: disinterested benevolence/arbiter/altruism all can only mean ‘impartial’, and those nouns do not collocate at all with uninterested.

The collocation disinterested bystander(s), however, is polysemous: it can mean ‘dispassionate’ or ‘unconcerned’, but in each case it’s clear what is meant:

But this was no ordinary extraordinary case.  And President Biden was no disinterested bystander.

Conversely,

Korda’s body language was that of a disinterested bystander.

And, finally and strangely, of the nine cases of uninterested observer (vs. the 221 disinterested observer(s)), several by my reckoning mean ‘unbiassed, dispassionate’:

 ‘An uninterested observer reading the (lawsuit) would likely be surprised and shocked by the conduct alleged,’ Barber wrote.

Now, is this straightforward modern confusion of the two terms, or the older meaning of uninterested lingering on? Or reasserting itself?

What do usage guides say?

Wearing my Fowler chapeau, I updated Burchfield’s recommendation in the entry for disinterested, which had been to use it only ever in its ethical sense. As I note: ‘It is clear that semantic change is well underway with this word. There is no reason whatsoever why it should be prevented from having two different meanings; most words do, and its two meanings rarely lead to confusion.’ But I did advise against using it in formal contexts, given the almost ancestral dislike of it among language peevers.

Analysis I carried out long ago for my Damp Squid, suggested that 50 per cent of uses of disinterested meant ‘not interested’, 40 per cent ‘impartial’ and 10 per cent were ambiguous.

The Merriam-Webster Concise Dictionary of English Usage produces a rather different figure in its superlative and thoroughgoing entry, namely, of 70 per cent for the ethical meaning of disinterested in its collection of citations going back to 1934. But a) that book was published in 2002, which can’t help but make me wonder if the proportions will have changed by now; b) alternatively, as so often, British and US usage might diverge; and c) in any case, citations are selected and therefore not necessarily representative or … disinterested.

A couple of linguistic nuggets

One thing the prefix dis– does is to simply negate its opposite, as in disadvantage, to disbelieve, to discredit, dishonest, … and, indeed, disinterested in its first, Donnean incarnation.

As the Merriam-Webster entry notes, dis– can also imply ‘once was but no longer is’, as in dis_affected or dis_connected.

My corpus data confirms this insight in two ways. First, the two verbs suggesting a change of state, grow and become, are much more frequent with disinterested, 81:29 and 461:168, respectively. Not only that, but remain occurs only with uninterested, which suggests that it’s an unchangeable, permanent state, unlike disinterested. Second, in looking at the seventeen examples of the collocation dispassionate and/or disinterested, I came across this:

The designer was characterised as a bored executive who had grown disinterested and dispassionate with the work he was doing.

Here the dis– of dispassionate creates a novel meaning by simply negating ‘passionate’, thereby sloughing off the factitious ‘passion’ people and companies routinely and banally proclaim in their social media profiles they bring to their chosen métier or sphere of operation.

As for ‘quaint’ in Byron’s lines,

Were pointed out as usual by the bedral,
    In the same quaint, uninterested tone:

how are we to know what Lord B. meant by the word?

The OED gives it now fewer (?less) than eighteen meanings, eleven of which it declares obsolete. The word is an object lesson in semantic change (as discussed in Philip Durkin’s The Oxford Guide to Etymology, pp. 228–30).

Of the meanings still alive in Byron’s day, and going by the collocation with uninterested, I’d plump for I.1.b., ‘Clever, ingenious; wise, knowing; skilled’, or, conversely, I.6., ‘Dainty, fastidious; prim’. My overall preference would be for ‘proud, haughty’, but the OED dates its death certificate to 1610. But who’s to say Lord B. hadn’t read it somewhere with that meaning and re-applied it? Alas, we shall probably never know.

‘Bedral’, incidentally, is a reminder of Byron’s young boyhood in Scotland – at Aberdeen Grammar School, between the ages of 7 and 10.*  It denotes ‘A church officer in Scotland with duties akin to, but not identical with, those of the English beadle, often combining those of clerk, sexton, and bell-ringer.’ In fact, the Don Juan quotation is one of the only three citations the OED accords it.

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* When he acquired his title at the age of ten, the school register was hastily upgraded to ‘Geo. Dom. de Byron’, intoned in the roll call as ‘Georgius Dominus de Byron’. His classmates’ jeering reduced him to tears, perhaps alleviated by the headmaster, who clearly knew which side his bread was buttered, inviting him to take cake and wine.

And here’s the great man himself. In Portrait of a Nobleman in the Dress of an Albanian, exhibited at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition of 1814. (It wasn’t only fancy dress; he had been to Albania by then, but the theatricality of the portrait has led to the amusing suggestion that this is Lord B. as portrayed by Errol Flynn.)