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I think there are at least two forces that lead to words changing meaning:

1. We are looking to express a emotion but want to empathize it more. Existing words get "used up" because we tend to inflate the strength. This is how we get words like "sick!", "awesome" (which changed meaning quite a while ago). Either new words get created or existing ones get taken over.

2. Some people literally don't understand the original meaning and their usage takes over. Supposedly this has happened with "literally".

My guess is that "nonplussed" is experiencing a little of both. Also "unruffled" IMO sounds terrible to modern ears (saying that as a ESL person though). Sounds like someone got out of bed and their hair is still excellent.

Edit: after talking about this with my author wife, I think "unruffled" and "nonplussed" also mean sightly different things to me. "Unruffled" acknowledges that there might be reason to care. "Nonplussed" to me is a lot more dismissive. Which kinda makes it fit my reason 1 for me.

> Some people literally don't understand the original meaning and their usage takes over. Supposedly this has happened with "literally".

What happened with literally is not that people didn't understand it's meaning and started using it with some other meaning. What happened with it is what happened with "very" a much longer time ago: it started being used as a generic augmentative adverb and started losing its specific meaning.

When I say "this coffee is so bitter I'll literally die", I'm using literally as an augmentative, as an exaggeration. Similarly, originally when you used "very bitter" it would mean "truly bitter", but overtime it started becoming just a formulaic way of strengthening the meaning of bitter.

I think that's how it started ("figuratively literally"), but not sure that modern youth know the literal meaning of literal.

As you say, its meaning extremely vulnerable to the fate it experienced, and many words have suffered the same fate: very, really, actually, ...

People who mock "misuse" of "literally" should take a good look that their own diction.

I promise you that the kids do know what literal means. They deserve more credit.

Here's how Horace puts it:

As leaves in the woods are changed with the fleeting years; the earliest fall off first: in this manner words perish with old age, and those lately invented flourish and thrive, like men in the time of youth. We, and our works, are doomed to death: whether Neptune, admitted into the continent, defends our fleet from the north winds, a kingly work; or the lake, for a long time unfertile and fit for oars, now maintains its neighboring cities and feels the heavy plow; or the river, taught to run in a more convenient channel, has changed its course which was so destructive to the fruits. Mortal works must perish: much less can the honor and elegance of language be long-lived. Many words shall revive, which now have fallen off; and many which are now in esteem shall fall off, if it be the will of custom, in whose power is the decision and right and standard of language.

> Supposedly this has happened with "literally".

Allegedly also with "factoid", which means "something which resembles a fact" versus the misuse of "a small fact".

It's frustrating because it's like watching people declare that aster-oids are actual stars, except smaller. Or that human-oids and andr-oids are small people.

This can be traced to CNN Headline News in 1991, which put "factoid" in common culture.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=n13g2Ae1GiU

There it was used to mean silly facts. I'm not sure "small fact" is the common use. I'd say "I had cereal for breakfast" is a "small" fact, but not a "factoid" in that sense.

Finally! Finally I’ve found a fellow factoid correct / original meaning aficionado!

I ceased to die on the hill but it still makes me twitch.

I like to soften the blow by noting at least we can all agree that saying "a factoid is a small fact" is a factoid.

"Unruffled" is an odd word. I know what it means but I wouldn't use it as the definition for another word. "Unfazed" feels like a stronger word meaning the same thing.

I think people just didn't know what "nonplussed" meant and analyzed a new meaning for it based on the belief that "non-" was a prefix.

It's a bit like how people analyze "disgruntled" and use humorously the non-word "gruntled" to mean "to be content".

I think what's happening today is almost all #2, but I'd argue it's not really that language is evolving, but just that people are continuously making mistakes, and somehow correcting them has become this weird taboo. You're a pedant or "grammar Nazi" for pointing out incorrect usage and grammar, so nobody learns and people keep making the same mistakes again and again.

Language evolves, but it evolves very slowly. Middle English didn't just turn into Modern English in a year, it happened over hundreds of years. What we're seeing today is probably noise due to a (hopefully temporary) illiteracy and education problem. If the language is really evolving such that "literally" turns into its opposite, we won't know this for decades.

The situation of correcting someone else's English is socially awkward, not least because the person doing the correcting usually gets it slightly wrong themselves. It's much better, in my opinion, if corrections are something that's done in private by editors (and if it's oral and thus can't be edited, I'm... nonplussed by the possibility of mistakes). However, even somewhat reputable publications in the Anglosphere rarely have that kind of rigour in their editing, so I think we're doomed to an accelerated level of change in the English language. At least that gives us linguistics enthusiasts more to talk about :)

From the article - "nonplus" evolved from a noun to a verb within the frame of the late 16th century to the early 17th century. A fairly short stretch of years.

Also I think we probably have far more literacy over the time frame of this nonplussed change than at pretty much any other time in history. So it seems strange to me to blame these shifts on illiteracy.

The period that "nonplussed" started developing this contrary meaning was the most literate and educated period in human history.

> But it raises a question. Do words evolve by mistake, or do they evolve because we need to say something and we don't have the right word for it?

Mostly the former, from what I can tell. People hear a “fancy” word, misunderstand it based on limited context, begin to use it where a less-fancy word would do (for whatever reason), and before long one cannot use the word in the original sense without being misunderstood by most audiences.

This typically results in reduced space for expression, as a distinct word with its own shades of meaning is turned into just “fancy [other word or phrase]”.

This is what militant descriptivists (and some prescriptivists) miss.

"Correct" and "incorrect" language is not the importsmant distinction.

What's important is whether a novelty of language increases or decreases expressive power. New words are better than corrupting old words, unles the old meaning is so low importance that it doesn't deserve to keep its place in the "Huffman" encoding of the language (which is, high frequency words/structures should be smaller).

Except nonplussed isn't a fancy word with pedigree, it's something that you would assume originated in 1984 as one of the words in the simplified language for proles.

It looks and sounds vaguely French-derived (even if it isn’t) but doesn’t end in -ment. That puts it in the “fancy” category for a lot of folks.

Why do you say that?

Not the GP, but imagine it has to do with "Newspeak" using the prefixes "plus" and "doubleplus" for emphasis. Nonplussed may have had a similar ring to "plusungood".

Actually, the proles in 1984 used normal English (as we read in the scene where Winston goes drinking in the proletarian sector and chats with the old man about life before Ingsoc). Newspeak was for the Party members.

It’s almost certain that the meaning of some words does evolve by mistake, and “nonplussed” may be an example of that. We learn the meaning of many words purely from context, and for some words, the typical contexts they appear in lend themselves to misinterpretation, in combination with what their linguistic form inherently suggests (like the “non-“ in “nonplussed”). When sufficiently repeated with the mistaken meaning, that new meaning is likely to become established.

> I was unaffected by the gift of an ice cream cone. I was unimpressed by the .. I was unruffled ... I was nonplussed ...

Exactly, if being unimpressed leads to you having nothing to say, then being unimpressed leads you to being nonplussed. If you're nonplussed then that might be due to being unimpressed. Thus being nonplussed can become a way of saying that one is unimpressed -- "nonplused" is a more impressive SAT word than "unimpressed" (which isn't an SAT word), so it's rather useful as a way to express just how unimpressed one really is: so unimpressed as to bring out a ten dollar word for expressing the level of unimpressedness.

> Do words evolve by mistake, or do they evolve because we need to say something and we don't have the right word for it?

Both, I believe. See also linguistic descriptivism versus prescriptivism. And the words cromulent and embiggen.

I have a pet theory that words in a language obey to both an etymological logic and a "poetic" logic. Sometimes the two don't coincide and the accepted meaning of the word drift toward the poetic imagery.