What does "laconic" mean?

[Baker, John]

        Are you sure that laconic did not refer to the first-person
narrator of the text, rather than the actor who recorded the audiobook?

        In any case, it isn't too surprising that well-educated
20-somethings would think that "laconic" means "without expressed
emotion."  After all, "laconic" derives from Greek lakonikos, referring
to Sparta, and the Spartans certainly have that reputation.  Or perhaps
I'm giving the 20-somethings too much credit.

John Baker


-----Original Message-----
From: American Dialect Society [mailto:ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU] On Behalf
Of Jesse Sheidlower
Sent: Wednesday, August 17, 2005 2:49 PM
To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
Subject: What does "laconic" mean?

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