3 ms·
Here's Webster talking about it https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/nonplussed https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/nonplussed My guess at why would be
by Spivak 3y ago
Here's Webster talking about it https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/nonplussed https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/nonplussed
My guess at why would be that US high schools pretty much universally teach 1984 with 'plusgood' and 'doubleplusgood' which is the only use of the plus- prefix in the novel. And since it's a nonstandard prefix people associate the word with plus. Newspeak slang would absolutely use plussed to mean "feeling plusgood" and when you encounter the word in the wild you just assume that's what it means.
Non- is perfectly logical extension of newspeak because neither anteplusgood nor unplusgood quite capture absence.
- burkaman 3y agoI think it's just because it's a relatively rare word (https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=nonplussed%2Cbewildered%2Cconfused&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=en-2019&smoothing=3 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=nonplussed%2Cb...), and it's often extremely difficult to figure out what it means from context ("He looked nonplussed"), so people just try to guess based on the word itself. Plus means like more of something, so not more, not a lot, something like that. "He looked not a lot", I guess not very interested. Plus might mean more of a reaction, so nonplussed is no reaction. Simple as that. I don't think most people paid as much attention to their high school reading as you're imagining. Also note that two of Merriam's examples are from before 1984 came out.