Furious altercations down the hall from the water cooler in One
Language Log Plaza today. Nunberg was shouting, red-faced: "Doctor
Johnson's vocabulary was good enough for him and it's good enough for
me!" Several younger staffers were arguing with him: "You gotta move
with the times!" Then somebody said, "For heaven's sake, there's only
one letter different," and everybody turned and started shouting at once. Should Nunberg have used "depreciate" to mean "to lower in estimation or esteem" (the first meaning in the Webster entry), i.e., "lower the value of by expressing the opposite of appreciation for", hence roughly what "denigrate" or "deprecate" would mean? He did, in this
post. And he meant it; it wasn't a typo. And the dictionaries back him up: the word can mean that. Yet a proofreader wrote to Nunberg
saying he had a ROTFL moment when he saw it... Well, I don't know. I
stayed well away from the whole rowdy scene. I've seen this kind of word-quarrel spiral down into violence, with men
dashing
glasses of chardonnay in each other's faces.
One time I saw young Bakovic and Beaver actually come to blows over
an adverb. We care about language here at Language Log. You
might want to look up depreciate and deprecate. Their meanings are very close, yet their
etymologies are quite different (the first from the Latin