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Comment by irrational | Hacker News Reader

My business coworkers are freaking out over Slack being down. But all my technical coworkers are nonplussed. It's interesting how those of us with a technical background are not too disturbed by things breaking.

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Interestingly, nonplussed is one of those words having two meanings that are at odds with each other. According to Google, those two meanings are:

1. (of a person) surprised and confused so much that they are unsure how to react. "he would be completely nonplussed and embarrassed at the idea"

2. INFORMAL•NORTH AMERICAN (of a person) not disconcerted; unperturbed.

I wasn’t aware of definition 1. I did mean the informal North American definition.

I'm 79, born in the mid-west, living in New England for the last 60 years. Worked in tech. I've never heard the word used except as in Def. 1.

I've never lived in the mid-west or the New England region of the USA. Maybe it's a regional usage (I've lived in Florida, Texas, California, Colorado, Utah, Oregon, and Washington). I'm not sure where I picked up my usage from. My dad is from Colorado and my mom from California. Maybe I picked it up from one of them ;-)

I'm from New England, I grew up with the informal definition and was super surprised when I heard the formal one.

I'm "plussed," because an app that I manage uses slackclient, and some people depend on it to get paid. Obviously it's my fault for not handling the error, and I hotfixed it, but still, wah.

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