What does "laconic" mean?

[Wilson Gray]

Well, though I'm no longer a twenty-something and modesty prevents me
from describing myself as "highly-educated," until I read this thread,
I, too, labored under the misapprhension that "laconic" means
"emotionless, affectless, dispassionate." I came to this conclusion as
a consequence of the contexts wherein the word usually appears in
literature. One never knows, do one?

-Wilson Gray

On 8/17/05, Jesse Sheidlower <jester at panix.com> wrote:
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Jesse Sheidlower <jester at PANIX.COM>
> 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
>


--
-Wilson Gray