A leading article in The Independent last week began: “There are times when all the disinterested observer can do is to stand and stare open-mouthed at this Government’s ability to tie itself in knots.”
With its mixed clich?s, that is not the most elegant of sentences, but it has an overriding merit: the writer uses “disinterested” correctly. The same cannot be said of the Independent columnist Adrian Hamilton, who wrote two days later of David Cameron’s policy on the Lisbon treaty: “If anything, he seems just disinterested in the issue, treating Europe as a distraction which he wishes would go away.”
To be disinterested is to be unbiased. This is the sense conveyed by the leader writer. Hamilton, however, meant that the Tory leader was bored by the European issue. Disinterested is the wrong term for this. Hamilton ought to have written “uninterested”.
The word uninterested is now rarely used by journalists. It should be revived. Credit is due, for example, to Sarah Lyall of The New York Times for writing recently that Richard Dawkins appeared “largely uninterested in standard authorial topics”.
Possibly Hamilton assumed that disinterested was a refined synonym for uninterested. It isn’t. Disinterested has a distinct meaning that is worth preserving, for its nuance is not quite captured by any other word.
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Disinterestedness is impartiality in the sense of having no stake in an issue. It evokes the same sense of “interest” (though it has a wider meaning than commerce alone) as when we speak of someone’s having a material interest in an outcome. If you come across disinterested used in any other sense, correct it boldly and complain loudly.