I was ambushed at breakfast this morning. It happened without warning. I was sipping my coffee and reading Jennifer Moorhead’s debut novel ‘Broken Bayou‘. I was five chapters in and things were going pretty well. Our heroine was in a diner in her long-escaped-from hometown, having breakfast with Travis, a Deputy she knew from way-back-when. They were discussing the discovery in the bayou of barrels containing dead bodies. I was fine until I read this:

“Travis.” A disturbing thought pops into my head. “Could this be a serial killer?” He shrugs, nonplussed, as if I’ve asked if he wants more coffee.

Moorhead, Jennifer. Broken Bayou (p. 57). Thomas & Mercer. Kindle Edition.

At that point, I was nonplussed, meaning that I was so perplexed that I couldn’t move forward. How could “He shrugs, nonplussed,” be followed by “as if I’ve asked if he wants more coffee”? Surely Travis, wouldn’t find an offer of more coffee confusing.

I was on page fifty-seven of the novel at this point. The rest of it had been well-written and free from the editorial mishaps that some ebooks are prone to, so I couldn’t understand why Jennifer Moorhead was using nonplussed to mean the opposite to what I thought it meant. I lost all interest in dead bodies in barrels. I needed to solve the mystery why nonplussed was being used this way.

I should explain that I’m a little geeky when it comes to words. I own three etymological dictionaries that I’ve had since long before anybody asked Siri anything. I like to know what words mean, why they mean that and where they came from.

I checked with my Chambers Twentieth Century Dictionary (yes, I know we’re not in that century anymore but it was the latestt edition when I bought it) and it offered:

“nonplus non’ plus n. a state in which no more can be done or said – great difficulty. v.t. to perplex completely, to make uncertain what to say or do: –pr.p non’plussing; pa. t. and pa. p. non’plussed. [L. non, not, plus, more.]

I cross-checked with my Chambers Dictionary of Etymology which offered the same definition and told me that this word, derived from the Latin, had been in use in English since 1582.

Still nonplussed, I used DuckDuckGo to search the Internet and the first thing it gave me was:

I read it twice and couldn’t grasp how the same word could have meaning 1. and meaning 2. so I followed the link to Wordnik and found this:

If this was right, then the English still used nonplussed to mean what it had meant since 1583 but US informal usage was beginning to use nonplussed to mean the opposite to what the English meant.

That was when i dropped through Alice’s looking glass and found myself looking up at Humptydumpty

Reluctant to have my world turned upside down by a single Internet source. I went looking for a different US view and found this article from Merriam-Webster “What’s Going On With Nonplussed?” which offered a descriptivist explanation that reminded me of why I distrust descriptivism‘s eagerness to believe that a self-seeded set of weeds and wild grasses should be accepted as a garden.

The article, which is actually quite fun if your a word person, says:

“There’s a new sense of nonplussed that people have been using, and…well, we’d just like to give you fair warning in case our descriptivist nature causes us to take action. This new sense appears to stem from a mistaken belief that the first three letters of nonplus are there to indicate that someone is something other than “plussed” (although what being plussed would entail here remains a mystery).

When I looked up the Merriam-Webster Dictionary entry for nonplussed, I found this:

I guess this makes me a language purist. I still deeply regret that US writers now use ‘kneeled’ when I’d expect them to use ‘knelt’ or ‘weeped’ when I’d prefer ‘wept’ but I can at least see that as a triumph of the regular over the irregular. I find myself completely unwilling to accept the inversion of the meaning of a word based on a misattribution of a prefix. This seems to me to be a triumph of ignorance over knowledge.