Mechanismatic

“I don’t want to belong to any club that would accept me as one of its members.”

But, you’re just one person. You won’t be present for 99.9999%+ of newer usages of terms, so you’ll be impotent to effect much change on the matter. With the level of illiteracy and the anti-intellectualism that seems rampant these days, even having a widely read column on a popular platform might be insufficient to turn such a tide. Maybe at best you’d be a screenwriter for a Hollywood blockbuster that a decent portion of the population watches and you could hope for the best, but even that seems weak considering we collectively don’t even remember movie lines accurately ten or twenty years later.

You should literally literally when a literally flies straight for your face because those feathered fowl can be as aggressive as gooses.

But the disputes occur because people use the newer, less common meaning until it becomes more common. If you discourage people from using the word “incorrectly” but it eventually evolves in meaning through usage because people ignore your encouragement to return to the original meaning, then you’d just be on the losing side of the battle historically.

I feel like it should be much more nuanced as to whether you encourage or discourage change. People reclaiming or usurping derogatory terms as a big FU to bigotry? Awesome. People twisting words for the purposes of oppressive, deceptive, or marketing purposes? Nope.

The reason behind the change should be preferably be intentional, backed by goodwill, and done in order to increase ease of communication because the old meaning/usage wasn’t sufficient.

But language is a shared medium and a lot of intention falls by the wayside because of random quirks as much by intentional campaigns.

This is where marketing creates special kinds of linguistic nightmares. Effectively, marketing is bullshit that becomes standard usage because it’s so pervasive and people unfamiliar with the field don’t know any better.

Hence LLMs are called AI. Two wheeled electric fire hazards are called hoverboards. 3G, 4G, 4G LTE, 5G, cell services usually aren’t up to the standards they claim.

Les Québécois sont entrés dans la conversation.

Seems like a variant of hypercorrection.

Yeah, I’m prone to go down rabbit holes looking at the etymology and origin of related words for hours. Latin was one of my favorite classes in high school. It’s great for world building and stylizing prose when writing fiction.

Sometimes the etymology is just weird because the current meaning is from an abbreviation of a phrase and the roots don’t make sense in isolation, such as perfidious, from the roots per fidem “through faith” but its meaning is from the larger phrase “deceiving through faith.”

My usual example is manufacture — to make by hand, but it’s more commonly used now to mean machine manufactured and made by hand is called handmade.

About 18 years ago when I was a dispatcher, I had someone call 911 to report their drug dealer stole their laptop because they couldn’t afford to pay for the drugs they wanted to purchase. I asked them a few times if they would like to file a police report that states that they intentionally purchased illegal drugs. They didn’t seem to understand the angle of the question and we asked them to stay where they were so a deputy could go out and take a statement.

I would guess someone invented the handshake in prehistoric times and we just have no medium in which a record could exist aside from an undiscovered cave drawing or something like that. Humans seem to naturally touch hands outside of any social influence or cultural history. Babies reach out and people touch their hands. It seems like a pretty intuitive human action. We touch things with our hands, so other hands seems natural as a thing to touch. The shake just seems like a minor variation on that.

But the $500 headset was endorsed by that famous person with that hit song from 20 years ago, so surely it’s been vetted for the highest quality manufacturing standards!

The odd thing is that when you get a little more money and you start spending the 50 dollars on the nice boots, you learn that there’s an assumption about quality built into the price. Sometimes the 50 dollar boots are 20 dollar boots with a fancy brand name. Or they used to be high quality, but the brand got bought out by venture capital and manufacturing moved to another country and the quality of the materials used in the process changed.