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An interesting phenomenon I've noticed is that a lot of people, and often intelligent people, believe that language that have been evolving for thousands of yea
by rumcajz 9y ago
An interesting phenomenon I've noticed is that a lot of people, and often intelligent people, believe that language that have been evolving for thousands of years should, somehow, just stop evolving today.
Interestingly, while one would expect it to be correlated with political belief (conservatives would want language as it was in good old days, progressives would embrace the change) my personal anecdotal evidence says it isn't.
- 2muchcoffeeman 9y agoRichard Dawkins once tweeted his rule for accepting something new. If it adds something new to the language, he accepts it. If we already have existing words that do a better job, he rejects it. This begrudgingly forced him to accept the use of ‘like’ the way teenage girls use it because they don’t mean “this person said”, or “I said”. They mean some more like “this person said something to the effect of”.
- rumcajz 9y agoInteresting. One would expect Dawkins, being an evolutionary biologist and father of the concept of meme, to just accept the change. But he probably wasn't speaking of what should or should not be. Rather about what he's doing himself.
- acbanker 9y agoIntelligent people don't necessarily think the language should stop evolving. The perception is that language started "devolving" since about 1950-1970. The same applies to arts, food and many other cultural achievements.