Or 1982, actually! Here's the piece:
"THERE'S A disconnect between Baker and the White House on this one." I heard that phrase while prowling the corridors of power. It was a hallway remark, an exchange between political appointees, hardly suitable as a citation for lexicographers, but its recording here will have to suffice. The overheard conversation had to do with a disagreement between the Secretary of State and the White House National Security Council staff. Apparently the communication between these centers of power was broken, and what was termed a disconnect had taken place. But it was not a disconnection; the word disconnect has a sense beyond the physical breakage of contact.
The earliest modern citations for this noun use of the verb disconnect were nonmetaphoric, purely physical: "Most of our citations have to do with phone-company usage," says James Rader, etymologist for Random House II. "In the November 1982 Maclean's magazine, this appeared: 'The number of disconnects for nonpayment is no higher than usual.' " The obvious meaning of the noun was "the cutoff of telephone service because the subscriber didn't pay" (followed by a Darth Vader recorded voice informing the caller that "That number is no longer in service," a euphemism for the previous "That number has been disconnected").
When did disconnect, a noun for a cutoff of slow payers, make a connection with a meaning of "breakdown of communication between people or policies"? The earliest citation in the Random House files credits the pollster and political analyst Pat Caddell (famed for his "national malaise memo" in the Carter era). Mr. Caddell, backing the nuclear-freeze movement in 1984, was described by Mother Jones magazine as "steaming over the intellectual and moral bankruptcy of the Democratic Party -- its 'disconnect,' as he put it, from the vast forces for sweeping social change that are waiting to be mobilized: 'Look at the energy that is out in this country that is not being coalesced and put together!' "
Mr. Caddell's use of disconnect as a noun caught on; in diplomacy, it means "the breaking off of discussions or negotiations," and in politics, I find that it has gained these meanings: "1. out-oftouchedness, or the failure to perceive the direction of a movement; 2. misunderstanding based on lack of communication; 3. outright disagreement."
Thus, we have witnessed what grammarians call a functional shift -- a change in the use of a word from its customary status to another part of speech. The word itself doesn't change, but its function does; if you cannot stomach this, stop using the noun stomach as a verb; on the other hand, if you get a kick out of it, enjoy the verb kick in its functionally shifted form, as a slang noun meaning "surge of pleasure."
In the spoken language, we often signify these shifts with a change in pronunciation: if you obJECT to being Her Majesty's SUBject, become an OBject lesson in refusing to subJECT yourself to the Queen; to make up, preSENT her with a PRESent.
Edmund Burke, the English political leader, would be pleased at the functional shift that turns the verb disconnect into a noun with such nice political nuances. Writing in 1769 of "the Present State of the Nation" (a phrase that was picked up by Americans writing the Constitution as State of the Union), Burke used disconnexion much as disconnect is being used today in warning of "a spirit of disconnexion, of distrust, and of treachery among public men."
― nabisco (nabisco), Wednesday, 12 February 2003 00:06 (twenty-two years ago)
Oh and Nick, maybe here's why: "disconnection" sort of connotes that there was previously a connection, which was actively
disconnected? Whereas simply saying there's "a disconnect" somehow connotes that they're just not connected, period, regardless of circumstance?
― nabisco (nabisco), Wednesday, 12 February 2003 00:13 (twenty-two years ago)