Question: Lately I've been hearing the word "disrespect" used as a verb (as in "he disrespected me") and it has been driving me absolutely crazy. When did this all start? It can't be right, can it?
- O. F., Natchez, Miss.
Answer: The verb form of "disrespect," meaning "to have or show disrespect for," has had a surprisingly long history. The first known use of the word comes from author George Wither's "Juve-nalia" of 1614. As reported in the "Oxford English Dictionary," the citation reads: "Here can I smile to see . . . how the mean mans suit is disrespected."
Although we have citations showing use of the verb up until the end of the 19th century, our files contain only one example of its use in our own century prior to 1974 (and that appears to be a mistake for "disregard"). In the late 1970s and 1980s, however, the word made a comeback. The rebirth of "disrespect" as a verb seems to have come from the speech and writing of African-Americans initially, and to have spread further with the appearance of the slang word "dis." Unlike "dis," the verb "disrespect" has not been labeled as slang by any dictionary or usage commentator, probably because of its long (albeit interrupted) history.
So although the use of "disrespect" as a verb might drive you crazy or seem wrong, there is nothing particularly wrong with it. In fact, some of our more recent examples of its use comes from daily newspapers, like this one from the Boston Globe: "What happened during World War II is that women at home began and continue to feel isolated, left out and disrespected."
Question: Your recent column about the use of "don't" in the third person singular (as in "It don't matter") reminded me of something else I've always wondered about regarding "don't." If it's a contraction of "do" and "not," why isn't it pronounced that way - "doont"?
Answer: We agree that the pronunciation of "don't" is curious, especially when you consider that not only does it not match "do," it also does not match "does." No one is sure how "don't" came by its pronunciation, but the most likely explanation is that it came through analogy with "won't" ("won't," of course, has its own story, but that's for another column).
The spelling of "don't" is also something of a mystery. You're correct, of course, that it's a contraction of "do" and "not." But how this spelling came to be used for the third person singular is not so obvious. "Don't" was a spoken form long before it was written down, so it seems likely that one or more phonological processes were involved. In 17th-century England, people in the north used "does" as the third person singular form of "do," and people in the south used "doth." These two forms had been in competition for several centuries. In addition to these two there was in the 16th and 17th centuries an uninflected form "do." Samuel Pepys, the famous English diarist, used it regularly. For example, in 1664 he wrote: "The Duke of York do give himself up to business, and is like to prove a noble prince ... but I should be more glad that the King himself would look after business, which it seems he do not." It is possible that this uninflected form had some influence on the written "don't."