A warning popped up on my computer recently, a message that I needed to uninstall the Flash Player plug-in because Adobe had deprecated it. I imagine

Deprecate? Depreciate? Let’s call the whole thing off.

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2021-05-24 18:00:10

A warning popped up on my computer recently, a message that I needed to uninstall the Flash Player plug-in because Adobe had deprecated it. I imagined a bunch of programmers yelling at a computer, “You’re no good, Flash!” “HTML5 runs rings around you!” I assumed deprecate meant “to belittle,” so Adobe’s usage seemed wrong. As it turns out, I am far from the first person to have been baffled by this word.

Today, deprecate most often appears in its reflexive adjectival form, self-deprecating: “tending or serving to disparage or undervalue oneself,” according to Merriam-Webster. We might make a self-deprecating comment in response to praise.

This usage is relatively new, however. Before 1950 or so, the more common term was self-depreciating. This was also the proper term, according to language mavens. In “Garner’s Modern English Usage,” linguist Bryan Garner draws a firm distinction between deprecate (“to disapprove earnestly”) and depreciate (“to belittle, disparage”). If “her mother deprecated her choice of husband,” Mom thoroughly disapproved of the guy; if “she depreciated him at every opportunity,” she talked smack about him at every turn. Thus, according to Mr. Garner, self-deprecating “is, literally speaking, a virtual impossibility.” Even he admits, though, that it is here to stay, since it’s far more common than self-depreciating.

Depreciate is changing too, and today is rarely encountered outside of financial contexts. It means “to fall in value” – “Sell your GameStop stock before it depreciates!” – or to claim tax deductions “for the wear and tear, deterioration, or obsolescence” of cars, real estate, and so on, according to the IRS.

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