Richard Armitage knows what the word “incredulous” means; but the folks who write the headlines at TheOneRing.net don’t.
"Austro" as in Rothbard and Wittgenstein, "Athenian" as in Aristotle and smashing-the-plutocracy.
About Roderick T. Long
The Empirical Me
I’m Roderick T. Long, Professor of Philosophy at Auburn University. I’m an Aristotelean/Wittgensteinian in philosophy and a left-libertarian market anarchist in social theory. (More about me here.) This blog, Austro-Athenian Empire, is a continuation of my earlier blog, archived here.
I guess Shakespeare didn’t know what it meant either:
Twelfth Night, III.4
I’m sure Shakespeare didn’t know what “incredulous” would mean in post-1800 English, no.
Merriam-Webster claims the use as ‘incredible’ has been revived in the 20th century.
Perhaps you do not know what the word means in post-2000 English
I’m not good enough with search engines or really feel like putting much effort into it, so I can’t actually confirm how common this sense of the word is.
Don’t you mean post-1900?
Anyway, I’m not going to drive off a cliff just because the Merriam-Webster map says there’s a bridge there.
I think Roderick’s point stands by virtue of the fact that the headline didn’t use the term as Armitage used it. Furthermore, lexicographers have a duty to record actual usage; language-users have at least good reasons to resist sloppy changes in their language.
“Credible” and “credulous” both come from the Latin root credere, to believe. So incredible means unbelievable, incredulous unwilling or incapable of believing. I can see the crossover here.