8 ms·
Semantic Drift
- Gimpei 7y agoReminds me of how nonplussed has been redefined to mean the opposite of its original meaning. Fine for the language to evolve but we need to stop that sort of thing. It's super confusing now whenever someone uses nonplussed. Which meaning are they using?
- taneq 7y agoYeah, sadly most people could care less and it’s literally the worst.
- antisemiotic 7y agocomprised of
- taneq 7y agosupposably comprised of.
- nerdponx 7y agoDefinately.
- dredmorbius 7y agoI get that alot.
- JetezLeLogin 7y agoits
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- chrismorgan 7y agoAn Australian, I was nonplussed by this claim, so I had to look it up. And indeed, https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/nonplussed#Adjective https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/nonplussed#Adjective: > Bewildered; unsure how to respond or act. [from 17th c.] > (proscribed, US, informal) Unfazed, unaffected, or unimpressed. [from 20th c.] Huh. And then https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Glossary#proscribed https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Glossary#proscribed is fun. But then, both “nonplussed” and “proscribed” are weird words where if you used them in a sentence and asked someone unfamiliar with them to guess their meaning they’d tend to guess quite the wrong direction. Something like this: “I guess ‘nonplussed’ means ‘not plussed’ like… not… benefited by? And ‘proscribed’, ‘pro-’ means in favour of and ‘scribed’ means written, so I suppose it means this is the way you should write it.”
- nerdponx 7y agoNative speaker here, I actually had no idea people used "nonplussed" to mean "unfazed".
- PeterStuer 7y agoNow imagine being a non-native English speaker brought up on an all-you-can-eat regime of cultural imperialist dishes but outside of the y'all-o-sphere. Should we follow down the 'Ow my balls' rabbit hole or just bifurcate?
- skrebbel 7y agoI imagine that maybe this was the point, but I'm a non-native English speaker and I do not understand a single part of your comment.
- hanoz 7y agoI'm a native English speaker, and I don't either.
- mrob 7y agoTranslation: >all-you-can-eat regime of cultural imperialist dishes American movies/TV/books etc. written by skilled professionals with formal English education. >the y'all-o-sphere Casual English users with no idea what a direct object is. >the 'Ow my balls' rabbit hole A world like the movie "Idiocracy", where a TV show about hitting people in the balls is considered highbrow entertainment. >or just bifurcate? Or risk becoming incomprehensible to the masses.
- PeterStuer 7y agoWhat can I say. Humour does not appear to be one of my talents. Thanks for the translation though. Spot on.
- TotempaaltJ 7y agoI think you did very well, and I didn't get it without the explanation.
- JetezLeLogin 7y ago
- ZeroGravitas 7y ago> “Literally” now means “really". Amusing to see my main argument against "literally" pedants being used directly in the complaint of one. "Really", "truly", "actually", "absolutely" and a bunch of other similar words should literally indicate the same thing as literally, that something is "real", "true", "actual" as opposed to "metaphorical" or otherwise exagerrated but now all have that meaning faded to just emphasis. If you can accept that then there's no real reason to not accept literally going the same way. If anything "literally" is a lot weaker a claim than "really" or "truly" yet "really killed last night" or "truly shocking" get a pass where "literally" wouldn't. Plus the other main use of "literally" is "look out, here comes a clever pun", which even as a fan of puns I'm not sure is a great loss.
- fhars 7y agoOf course the author is playing with the very things she criticises, and other people’s linguistic peeves. Just look at how she ends the article on a split infinitive.
- ZeroGravitas 7y agoI'm not so sure. She does specifically mention that one earlier as a convention she doesn't care about or follow and does seem to wrestle with her own knowledge that the things she does care about are basically pointless, but still takes them seriously. English is so confusing you can easily read too much into it (eg. was she intentionally playing with the dual meanings of abysmal (terrible vs deep)? I don't think so, but couldn't swear to it.
- fhars 7y agoWell, she explicitly says that the question of split infinitives leaves her „nonplussed“, which I read as a deliberate play.
- arrrg 7y agoThat’s an obvious joke but it’s right in the middle of a section about things she is ok with but the generation prior to her wasn’t. It would be bad writing if she weren’t actually serious about those things.
- danieltillett 7y ago"Racist" and "Nazi" are headed the same way. This frustrates the hell out of me as these are both terms that should be used for the highest level of condemnation, not something to just smear your political opponents.
- ZeroGravitas 7y agoI'm the opposite, "Nazis" seem to have turned into saturday morning cartoon villains, who sneeringly laugh as they plan to destroy the world, and one-off aberations that can never happen again rather than rather fairly standard fascists who got a whole bunch of people killed in the usual way that fascists do. But I am reading "It Can't Happen Here" right now, so maybe I'm biased by that. It's certainly confusing reading a book written in 1935 that talks about the Nazis without full knowledge of what was to follow and think "this could be taken straight from today" as well as realising that it wasn't even extreme satire at the time, but rather mostly based on Huey Long and other real figures. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It_Can%27t_Happen_Here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It_Can%27t_Happen_Here Wow, reading that wikipedia article I'm amazed to find out the sci-fi television series V started out as an adaptation of It Can't Happen Here. Mind. Blown.
- danieltillett 7y agoI think we are actually in agreement. "It can't happen here" was written after the rise of the Nazis so it not that surprising that it appears prescient. The same forces that gave rise to the Nazis in Germany were present in many countries in 1935 including the USA. Looking to the past can be very dangerous. Yes it helps to know history, but the conditions that gave rise to Nazism were conditional on the time. History can lead us astray and cause us worry about things that don't really matter and miss the new things that do.
- lovemenot 7y ago>> so it not that surprising that it appears precedent. prescient, right? Usually I would not have bothered, but given the context...
- kbutler 7y agoHear, hear! Although I'm a curmudgeon at heart, I'm trying to help my children internalize the fact that "correct" language evolves. Learn the right meaning, syntax, pronunciation, and idioms so you don't sound uneducated, but realize that people may differ in their perception of "correct" or acceptable. "Be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others." (Comma-splice noted)
- CharlesW 7y agoI just had a similar conversation with my daughter about the entomology of a word that you would never use today, but was in relatively common use when I was a kid. It's kind of amazing how (living) languages mutate.
- gniv 7y agoThat was fun to read. I’m happy she mentioned nonplussed since, as a non-native speaker, I never quite grasped its meaning. Now I understand why.
- hodgesrm 7y agoWait until you try to use "sanction" (especially as a verb, where the different meanings are close to opposite). [1] The verb "table" is another one with opposite meanings. [2] The English language appears designed to foil friend and foe alike. [1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/sanction https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/sanction [2] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/table https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/table
- marcosdumay 7y agoThe dual meaning of sanction seems to be on every language that imported it from Latin. I imagine is remotes to the Romans. Anyway, both meanings are a positive administrative act, where an executive does the thing he usually does. The different meanings usually don't mix on the same context.
- coldtea 7y ago>“Literally” now means “really,” or, worse, “figuratively.” (Anyone claiming that “my head literally exploded” would not have lived to tell the tale.) Now "now", since centuries. Get on with the program. Several other words are their own antonyms, including "dust" (to clean up dust or add dust), "oversight" (to supervise, but also the result of lack of supervision), "clip" (attach but also cut off), etc.
- arrrg 7y agoActing as if context doesn’t exist is repeating weird motif of this genre of dignified dusty outrage. Using these words in a context where the context doesn’t make its meaning clear is a bad, sure, but other usage is quite unproblematic.
- coldtea 7y agoPlus, even the context-free use allows for interesting puns, non-committal ("diplomatic") responses, and so on. If all words had that problem, sure it would be bad. But some words needing extra context to disambiguate is not a real problem (nor a new phenomenon). In fact we even have it in parsers, where it helps to make syntax lighter and more pleasant (at the cost of complicating the parsing rule).
- riffraff 7y agoAs a non native speaker, my biggest gripe is that words which meanth the same thing have diverged. For example, "egregiously" meant "very well" and "egregiamente" still does in Italian. But in English, it now means "very badly". At the same time, people who spend a lot of time using English end up reimporting words with the same root into my own language when we already have something (e.g. the word spelled "decade" in Italian means "ten things" while the semantically equivalent "ten years" is "decennio", but some people will now commonly use the former to mean the latter because they just mock English)
- jacques_chester 7y agoLatin words mostly came to English through Norman French after William the Conqueror and his followers became ruling class in 1066. In the intervening thousand years there was a lot of time for the meanings to diverge and invert. English is particularly rich in false friends and loanwords because of its hybrid origins. Only recently has it begun to export words back out to other languages (eg. "le weekend").
- empath75 7y agoActually quite a lot of the Latin and Greek words came several centuries after the Norman invasion as renaissance scholars introduced them — often to ‘correct’ French words. Then quite a lot more came through scientific terms in the industrial era.
- jacques_chester 7y agoYes, I should've mentioned them rather than sweeping it all under loanwords.
- hodgesrm 7y ago"Egregiously" is interesting. Your definition matches my OED. But "egregious" also has the original meaning from Latin "egregius" which is literally something that stands out from a flock (for example of sheep), hence remarkably good. "University" is another confusing derivation. It's common to ascribe it to classical Latin "universitas" which means "universe" and implies a university teaches all things. Actually though the OED, the Cambridge Medieval History, and Wikipedia agree that when first applied in the middle ages "universitas" had the meaning of society or guild and applied to the faculty plus students of institutions like Bologna or Padua. [1] At the risk of flogging a dead horse it's all egregiously confusing. I think I got that right. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University
- lonelappde 7y agoArticle has an autoplay video absolutely-positio oned ad where the close button is so tiny that clicking on loads the ad page instead of closing. Article has a second fly out ad after you start scrolling. Article has a fixed layout with tiny font.
- charles_f 7y agoRelates to the usual debate of whether the language ought to remain in the form that was crystallized at a given moment, or accept the transformation contemporary users are making. I used to not care, but having read some Chomsky lately, it seems that some of those semantics transformations are made to serve an agenda - and now I feel that battling for stability has some sense. Kind of like trying to use the language as the unit for ideas, you might want to have the language as a stable reference frame so that everyone understands those ideas.
- hodgesrm 7y agoOn the other hand language has been used for millennia as a way to exclude people. Think Oxford English or "standard" American as a marker for class, for instance. I'm fine with linguistic change if it leads to us being more accepting of others.
- afiori 7y ago> Relates to the usual debate of whether the language ought to remain in the form that was crystallized at a given moment, or accept the transformation contemporary users are making. That is a false dichotomy in my opinion. If you see language as a tool then the most relevant characteristic is not stability of fluidity, but usefulness. Language changes because we are (subtly) using is differently, some of these changes are sometimes actually many different competing mutations or are just born out of "I need a new word for this".
- stoksc 7y agoLay/laid as their ‘descent to barbarism’ makes me scared what they’d say about me..
- JetezLeLogin 7y agoI'm sure it's a little bit tongue-in-cheek.
- 333c 7y agoThe whole article is a little hyperbolic, but the distinction is important. To "lie" is to position one's own self, while to "lay" is to position some grammatical object. Confusingly, "I will lay myself down" is grammatically correct, because "myself" serves as the object. There are situations in which using the wrong verb conveys a different meaning. "Please lie down on the floor" is a request to put yourself horizontally on the floor, while "please lay down on the floor" is a request to spread soft feathers underfoot.
- steve_taylor 7y ago> “He means fewer water” or “She means less bottles.” This is wrong. “Fewer” is for quantities (i.e. countable things) whereas “less” is for a singular mass.
- valleyer 7y agoYou're missing the sarcasm. The full quote: > Thus on the rare occasions these adjectives are actually deployed accurately on TV, my husband and I will interject mischievously, “He means fewer water” or “She means less bottles.”
- nerdponx 7y agoApparently this was never a rule except in textbooks, like splitting infinitives, ending sentences with prepositions, typesetting ordinal suffixes ("th" etc) in superscript, and always putting punctuation inside of quotation marks.
- 333c 7y agoI'm confused what you mean. As a native speaker, these are definitely rules. As your parent comment says (missing the sarcasm of the article), these examples sound (and are) wrong.