What does "laconic" mean?

[Jesse Sheidlower]

Well, _I_ know what it means, and you probably do too. It's
the rest of the world I'm wondering about.

I was recently reading an online post about an audiobook, and
read the comment, "Narrator a bit too laconic for my taste,
but oh well."

I thought, "How can it be the narrator's fault?", then
realized that there's probably a semantic shift here, and did
the usual exercise of asking a dozen or so highly educated
twentysomethings what they thought the word meant, and
discovered that they _all_ think _laconic_ means something
like 'emotionless; affectless; dispassionate'.

While I can see how this interpretation arose, I've never
encountered it before; it's not in a medium-size pile of
dictionaries and usage books I've checked, and we don't
have any examples in our files. A quick look through some
online sources suggests that the usual 'using few words'
meaning is the one people use in print.

Any thoughts?

Jesse Sheidlower
OED