A week ago my football team lost, in a performance the local rag described disparagingly as disinterested. Hardly a put-down, I thought to myself, imagining the clinical demolitions of other teams by a certain very distant team. Maybe it was their game plan to keep emotions out of the game.
Enough of this folly. The word the journalist was looking for was uninterested, meaning bored. The umpires, on the other hand, were the disinterested people on the field, being unbiased and impartial, bless 'em.
It's this disinterested word that's the problem. If it had never been invented, and we'd been forced to use its synonyms, we'd have no problem. But, as its usage has increased. remembering its difference from the aforementioned uninterested has proved tricky. To wit, I offer the uninterested onion.
Imagine a large onion with a hole right the way through it. It has been bored. It is a bored onion. The start of onion rhymes with uninterested. Whenever you're planning on using disinterested or uninterested think of the bored onion.
I couldn't think of a good memory aid for disinterested, except the unbiased disinterested dispute-settler. It doesn't have the right ring about it. Anyway, give it a go. You do have a few neurons spare to store these aids, don't you...