Disinterested or uninterested? How long we should cling to a word's original meaning. - By Ben Yagoda - Slate Magazine - 3 views
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There is no exact synonym for (the old-fashioned) disinterested, for example. In such cases, keeping a "legacy" sense in circulation is laudable activism in pursuit of semantic sustainability—as if you found some members of a near-extinct species of mollusk and built a welcoming environment in which they could breed.
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Semantic Sustainability
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Here's a followup on the Economist's language blog: http://www.economist.com/blogs/johnson/2011/04/change . The comments are pretty interesting, too.