I recently received an emissive from Emily, an appreciative reader of my new book
The Accidents of Style. At the end she noted that in my discussion of the misuse of
disinterested for
uninterested “you admit that the mistake has become so common that dictionaries are including it. I have to ask: at what point do you accept the mistake as an irreversible step in the evolution of the English language? Once a mistake is included in dictionaries, is it reasonable to expect it to ever come out?” This was my response:
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