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andycowley

As a Brit, I don't think I've ever encountered the latter meaning. I've only ever heard it to mean 'perplexed'.

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Its clearly a UK/USA split, for some reason the article does not mention this.

Wikipedia has it on 'List of words having different meanings in American and British English'

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_words_having_different...

The article does not mention this, but the second paragraph links a MW definition which does explicitly call out that this usage is primarily US-based: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/nonplussed

Also a Brit, but I thought it meant "unbothered" until 5-6 years ago.

Another Brit confirming this understanding of the word (although I just found out about the original meaning about a minute ago).

As a non native English speaker, it’s my first time seeing or hearing this word.

Don't worry I'm sure there are a good number of native English speakers who've never come across it either. It's not exactly in common usage.

If it were in common usage, there couldn't be confusion over its meaning. The whole situation can only arise for words that most people don't know.

Which means it's of particularly limited use to a foreign speaker.

Yeah, if I was a non-native English speaker, I'd be nonplussed about the word (both meanings).

But some commonly used words are confusing. Sanction means both to allow and to disallow. Literally is a nightmare, especially in written form, but also spoken without enough cultural context.

I don't like all these examples, but here's a list of 40 mostly common words or two word phrases that mean their opposite. [1] There's probably 10-20 of those that a new to English speaker is likely to run into. But then, I never got far enough into other languages, maybe this is a common phenomenon.

[1] https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/57032/25-words-are-their...

> But some commonly used words are confusing. Sanction means both to allow and to disallow.

Well, technically, it means to allow or to punish. But you're close enough. It does have these two senses, they are obviously in tension with each other, and both are common.

But, because both senses are common, this isn't a source of confusion. (And the later sense of punishment did not arise from confusion on the part of speakers, as is the case for nonplussed.)

As a non native its always fun to learn new vocab. A few months ago I heard the word Vicariously for like the second or third time, and when I looked at the definition it was interestingly both complex and very human at the same time:

experienced or realized through imaginative or sympathetic participation in the experience of another.

As an American, I assume without evidence that it's way more common in British English, because over here it feels like an exotic word that people only pull out to be semi-fancy, like "whom".

like an exotic word that people only pull out to be semi-fancy, like "whom"

Semi-fancy? Man, that's a pretty low bar for fifty-cent words. I use it so I sound like I actually went to school and paid attention. If those with whom I speak find basic grammar fancy, that's on them.

What makes the latter sentence sound highfalutin is that you've been required to contort it away from idiomatic American English sentence structure in order to force in a "whom". The usual way of phrasing the sentence avoids "who" entirely: "If the people I speak with" or "If the people I'm talking to".

Who(m) are you talking about?

It's the "m", not the sentence structure. The awkward archaic structure is a different, often comorbid, affectation among Latinophiles.

Wait… do Americans not say whom?

The Americans who know when to use whom and who and Americans who think they know when to use whom and who are those who use whom, while Americans whom the distiction between who and whom thouroughly confuses and Americans to whom whom is entirely unknown are those by whom who is solely used.

Oh it's a bit more complicated than that. There are also those who don't use whom because they know it's a relic of a case system that has been gradually fading for a thousand years. Not to mention those whom use it incorrectly on purpose to annoy the pedants.

Kudos for writing the entire sentence without making a mistake (yes, I checked). Although perhaps the use of 'whilst' would complete the intended stylistic flare?

Not much.

Americans use "whom" some, especially in formal writing and/or speech, but colloquially "who" is much more common.

For example, as an American a sentence like "Whom did you invite to the party?" sounds a bit stilted and formal to me.

> as an American a sentence like "Whom did you invite to the party?" sounds a bit stilted and formal to me

It would be fair to call this ungrammatical in American English.

But whom does survive in fronted prepositional phrases ("the person for whom this item was obtained..."). It's dead in prepositional phrases that haven't been fronted just like it's dead everywhere else.

Something vaguely similar happened in Spanish, where there is a special pronoun case that can only be used with the preposition con ("with"). There, the special case descends from, interestingly enough, the same preposition, Latin cum, instead of from the Latin case system. But the phenomenon ends up being the same.

"Whom in this room would you boom?" is not ungrammatical though.

https://www.nytimes.com/1993/04/11/theater/sunday-view-party...

It's certainly a surprising enough construct that it sounds incorrect, which is the metric that matters most to most people.

> "Whom in this room would you boom?" is not ungrammatical though.

Try polling some people on that.

We do, but "who" is acceptable in both tenses. There's no reason to ever use "whom" because it's the only one you can use wrong.

"To whom did you give the book?" is more often "Who'd you give the book to?" complete with the similarly forbidden preposition.

Yet, among those with whom I associate, "Who didja..." is more common than the semantically equivalent elision "Who'd you", probably because it is ambiguous whether the latter is in the past or present tense.

(For context, I live in south-west England, have an RP accent, and 'whom' was genuinely the word that felt most natural to me when writing this post.)

People speak of the future conditional so rarely, it doesn't affect linguistic evolution. "Whodja" being shorter and less stuttery than "whodidja" is a much more powerful driver. Like "Wensday", unless you actually need to disambiguate past from future.

> because over here it feels like an exotic word that people only pull out to be semi-fancy, like "whom".

Them's fightin' words. 'Whom' is super useful because it is grammatically necessary.

Give me a sentence where it necessarily eliminates ambiguity and I will thoughtlessly replace it with something more colloquial and similarly unambiguous. It's possible you'll find an example I can't trivially fix, but I think they're rare enough to be more or less irrelevant.

"Babe, we have guests, whom we use the fancy relative pronouns with."

Don't make me delve any deeper into pedantry ("with whom we use...")

JK Rowling uses it frequently in the Harry Potter series, a series aimed at children. I assume her editors carefully combed her words for anything that may confuse a child. Nonplussed got through. Perhaps because British editors thought nonplussed is easy to understand?

I always knew it as perplexed. I eschew this inferior recent meaning.

As another Brit, I too have only ever used it to mean perplexed.

But frequently I’ve seen it used in the context of perplexed about the fuss - which I guess has contributed to the newer meaning

what about 'moot'. Do Brits screw that up like Americans? 'moot point'

Hmmm, is the second definition here [1] the "screwed up" one?

> An issue regarded as potentially debatable, but no longer practically applicable. Although the idea may still be worth debating and exploring academically ... the idea has been rendered irrelevant for the present issue.

That's literally the only way I've heard it. (American here.) I'm nonplussed about this.

1. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/moot_point

"The second usage given is modern and is the meaning more commonly understood in American English, possibly because of the association with moot court."

"Up for debate but not decided yet"

"Debatable, but decision doesn't matter".

It's a natural ambiguity, resolved by context, one of many, many in language. Which one is correct is a mute point.

A rare thing to be able to hear people talk who actually know what words mean.

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