Pylimitics

English is changing all the time. That’s why it’s tricky to claim that somebody has used “the wrong word” in a particular case. Nobody decides what English words are supposed to mean — instead, if a word is “commonly” used in a particular way, well, that’s pretty much what it means. More or less. Of course there are some checks and balances here and there. You can use dictionaries to see how words have commonly been used, and if it’s used too far outside of what you find, that’s generally a good basis to conclude that it’s in error. But dictionaries just describe how words are and have been used; they don’t have any real authority over the language.

There are plenty of cases where English words changed their meaning simply because enough people happened to end up making the same mistake at about the same time. Sometimes you can catch this right in the act. Here’s an example.

“Disperse” means to break up, to spread throughout an area, to scatter. A crowd disperses throughout a city. Milk, when poured into a cup of coffee, disperses throughout the volume of liquid. “Disperse” comes from the Latin “dispersus,” which is based on the root “spergere,” to scatter or sprinkle.

“Disburse” is a different word, and it means to pay out. Funds are disbursed, on paydays for example. “Disburse” also comes from Latin: “bursa” means “bag”, and entered Old French as “borse” (purse), which is the basis for the Old French “desborser,” which also meant, basically, “take money out of your purse to pay for something.” There’s nothing about “disburse” that has anything to do with scattering. 

“Disperse” and “disburse” are very similar, particularly if you just hear them rather than see them in print. You can imagine people mistaking one for the other. And I think that’s exactly what’s happening, as chronicled in dictionaries. If you look up the meaning of “disperse” in a dictionary, you’ll see everything related to scattering and nothing at all related to payment. And “disburse” has nothing to do with scattering and everything to do with payment. But if you look up “disburse” in at least one dictionary (the Random House one), there are two meanings. Number one is “to pay out”, and number two is “to distribute or scatter”. 

How about that? It’s almost like a mistake in understanding “disperse” versus “disburse” is being dispersed throughout the language, and maybe disbursed as well.