A language may also vary owing to changes that the system undergoes in the course of time. The language of the seventeenth century differs from the language of today. For instance in the seventeenth century it would have been normal to say I am glad Mr Soandso has made so much despatch, while today we would probably say something like I am glad Mr Soandso has got on so quickly. It would be ridiculous to debate whether seventeenth century usage was more ‘correct’ than that of the present day; it was just different. Linguistic change is inevitable. Sometimes it may seem that a change has been for the worse. This is because when we are conscious of a change taking place, we are also aware that the change brings some inconvenience with it. But the inconvenience is temporary. When a change has been completed and has become a thing of the past, it is no longer inconvenient and the earlier state of the language system is forgotten; but while the change is in progress, there is instability within the system and people may misunderstand one another, or become irritated by innovations of expression. These misunderstandings and irritations pass away in the course of time and the language emerges from the change neither worse nor better, but simply different. Let us take a specific example. The word disinterested often causes a problem. Some speakers understand by it the same meaning as impartial; this is the older-established sense of
the word. It is the negative of the word interested in the sense ‘affected or biased by personal considerations’ (see Chambers’s Twentieth Century Dictionary). Other speakers, however, use the word as a synonym for uninterested; that is, they understand it as the negative of interested in the sense ‘in a state of engaged attention and curiosity’. This is a new sense of disinterested which may cause misunderstanding or, more likely, irritation to users of the older sense. It is easy to see how the innovation has come about; the sense of interested which is negated by disinterested is rather rare and specialized and is probably not very familiar to a good many speakers. The result of the change is a certain amount of inconvenience. When we hear somebody say: She went to the conference and attended most of the sessions,…she was disinterested, we might not know whether the speaker means that she was bored or that she was impartial. Conversely, if we wish to use the word disinterested ourselves, we cannot be confident, unless we know our audience very well, that we shall be understood in the sense we intend. The wise communicator who is conscious of a danger of being misunderstood will normally take steps to avoid it—that is, if the purpose is to communicate rather than to teach his audience a lesson. In the case under discussion there are, after all, the words impartial and unbiased to resort to. If enough people took this decision, the word disinterested might eventually fall into disuse, but this would not matter very much as there are other words and expressions that have come to take on its meaning. Such matters as these often arouse extraordinarily strong emotions and may give rise to discussions in which terms of abuse such as ‘corruption’, ‘ignorance’, ‘slovenliness’ and ‘barbarism’ are hurled about. The severity of these words is out of proportion to the very slight ripples on the surface of the language system which cause them. It is sometimes said that writers and teachers have a duty to ‘preserve the language from corruption’. Writers and teachers might very well reply that they acknowledge no such duty. In the first place, change is not corruption but just change, and second, a writer’s duty is, presumably, to communicate with his public and a teacher’s duty to serve the interests of his pupils. The latter does this partly by ensuring that the pupils are aware of the pitfalls that result from the very nature of language—its mutability. Perhaps teachers who fulfil this duty will be helping to slow down the rate of linguistic change as much as it is possible to slow it down; more
than this cannot reasonably be asked of them.