- cross-posted to:
- usa@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- usa@lemmy.ml
When former president Donald Trump’s media start-up announced in October 2021 that it planned to merge with a Miami-based company called Digital World Acquisition, the deal was an instant stock-market hit.
With the $300 million Digital World had already raised from investors, Trump Media & Technology Group, creator of the pro-Trump social network Truth Social, pledged then that the merger would create a tech titan worth $875 million at the start and, depending on the stock’s performance, up to $1.7 billion later.
All they needed was for the merger to close — a process that Digital World, in a July 2021 preliminary prospectus, estimated would happen within 12 to 18 months. “Everyone asks me why doesn’t someone stand up to Big Tech? Well, we will be soon!” Trump said in a Trump Media statement that month.
Now, almost two years later, the deal faces what could be a catastrophic threat. With the merger stalled for months, Digital World is fast approaching a Sept. 8 deadline for the merger to close and has scheduled a shareholder meeting for Tuesday in hopes of getting enough votes to extend the deadline another year.
If the vote fails, Digital World will be required by law to liquidate and return $300 million to its shareholders, leaving Trump’s company with nothing from the transaction.
For Digital World, it would signal the ultimate financial fall from grace for a special purpose acquisition company, or SPAC, that turned its proximity to the former president into what was once one of the stock market’s hottest trades. Its share price, which peaked in its first hours at $175, has since fallen to about $14.
Digital World’s efforts to merge with Trump Media have been troubled almost from the start, beset by allegations that it began its conversations with the former president’s company before they were permitted under SPAC rules.
Then, in the past year, its issues became more pronounced: Its chief executive was terminated by the board, a former board member was arrested on charges of insider trading, and the company agreed to pay an $18 million settlement to resolve charges that it had misled investors and given false information to the Securities and Exchange Commission.
The merger has “been pretty much unprecedented in terms of all of the glitches,” said Jay Ritter, a University of Florida finance professor who studies stock markets. “The deal does seem to be running out of time. You can’t just keep getting extensions forever.”
Nonplussed.
I hate this word because its actual meaning is to be surprised and confused, and people use it more and more often to mean basically the opposite (I assume because the “non” makes “nonplussed” sound like a lack of something), and now the word’s two meanings coexist in opposition of each other, and I just have to use everything else to determine which meaning it is supposed to be.
When people use it a certain way more and more, you can expect that to become the default meaning. When the scenario is people vs dictionary, you can expect the people to win. After all, who writes the dictionary?
My point is that I hate it because we are smack dab in the middle of the transition, where it’s very unsettled which meaning has won out.
I’m neither confused about how a word’s meaning can evolve nor am I arguing that it shouldn’t happen. (In fact, I think language change is very cool.) I just think this word is sitting in a particularly awkward place at this moment in time that makes it very annoying. It’s an aesthetic opinion of sorts.
I’m not plussed in the slightest.
Minimal plussing to begin with tbh
“Behold the field where I grow my pluss! Gaze upon it, and see that it is barren!”
I only know that word because Archer, but I feel like it doesn’t quite capture the “no shit lmao” feels of what I’m going for.
Only in informal usage though. Formally, nonplussed means exactly the opposite as in “surprised and confused.” If you want to sound smart/educated, don’t use it in the sense of being “unsurprised.” Especially outside of North America.
“Common usage” is a thing. Don’t be surprised to wind up on the losing side of this battle.
You are 100 percent correct. That said, I don’t have to like it.
I am an amateur linguistics nerd and fully embrace the fact that I am often on the losing side of usage.
If it helps you feel better, English is a garbage fire. Literally! Flammable and inflammable mean the same thing! There’s no use trying to make this language make sense!
All languages are internally inconsistent and tend to fracture syntax and meaning over time and across space. This is not unique to English and in fact is an inherent concomitant with grammatical and linguistic recursion.
Were this not the case, we’d all be speaking some kind of universal “proto-language” that arose out of our origins as a species in east Africa.