The Yagoda Scale : Blog Excerpts : Thinkmap Visual Thesaurus

Recently on Slate, University of Delaware English professor Ben Yagoda tackled "the 'nonplussed' problem": How long should we cling to a word's original meaning? (Nonplussed, for instance, has changed its meaning for many people from "perplexed" to "unfazed.")

Yagoda, who we've heard from recently decrying his students' clunky writing style and creeping Britishisms in American English, writes that using older meanings of words sometimes "seems designed to attract attention, and nothing more." He continues:

But using a meaning on its way to extinction can be nobler than such exhibitionism. Balancing the possibility that you'll confuse your audience, and the prospect of appearing pretentious or dorky, is the chance that the old meaning could be a really good meaning, which no other word conveys precisely. 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.

So, pedantry on one side, conservation on the other. What's needed is an algorithm to help you decide where on the continuum a particular word or expression lies.

Yagoda then presents his own makeshift metric for determining how far along a change in meaning is (by examining a sample of Google results) and his own "utility rating" based on his view of how valuable the older meaning is. Then he combined the two ratings to determine a score that "correlates roughly with academic grades": "65 or better means the old sense still passes, and you should feel free to use it. If it doesn't pass, you can either convert to the new sense or, if that's too painful, avoid the word entirely." See if you agree with his findings:

Word	Traditional Definition	New Definition(s)	%	Utility Rating	Score
*Beg the question*	Assume a claim is true without evidence other than the claim itself (circular logic)	Prompt or raise a question	5%	3	65
*Decimate*	Kill one-tenth of a population	Kill or eliminate a large enough proportion of something so as to render it ineffective	0%	0	0
*Disinterested*	Lacking a selfish reason to favor a particular side in a debate or contest, and therefore impartial	Uninterested	15%	3	75
*Eke out*	Make a small amount of something last, with sparing use	Achieve narrowly and laboriously	0%	3	60
*Fortuitous*	Accidental; unplanned	Lucky	5%	2	45
*Fulsome*	Offensively excessive	Abundant; full	0%	2	40
*Hoi polloi* ¹	The common people	The fancy people ²	90%³	1	110
*Lion's share*	All or nearly all	The majority	0%	0	0
*Momentarily*	For a moment	In a moment; presently	80%⁴	1	100
*Nonplussed*	Perplexed	Unfazed; nonchalant	45%	2	85
*Presently*	Shortly	Now; currently	0%	2 ⁵	60 ⁶
Toothsome	Delectable; attractive	Having big or prominent teeth; quality of a food that is dense or chewy	30%	2	70
*Verbal*	In words	Oral; spoken	0%	2	40
¹ Pedants and classics majors will point out that it is incorrect to say "the hoi polloi," because in Greek, hoi means the. ² Probably because it sounds like "hoity toity." ³ I did not include two articles that discussed the proper meaning of hoi polloi. ⁴ This is a misleadingly low number, I would say, since the new meaning of momentarily is most often used conversationally, and hence is not likely to show up in news reports. Most of the Google News new-meaning citations are real-time updates, for example, "More details will be added to this story momentarily." ⁵ The new meaning of momentarily denotes the traditional meaning of presently. ⁶ I have made an executive decision to raise the score of presently by twenty points because context makes clear that the traditional meaning indicates a future action or occurrence, reducing confusion or ambiguity.