4 ms·
You know what "decimate" meant, but what it means in modern English is different. It's less the "real" meaning than the "original" meaning, but age doesn't make
by jdashg 6y ago
You know what "decimate" meant, but what it means in modern English is different. It's less the "real" meaning than the "original" meaning, but age doesn't make it more correct. "axing a question" is over a thousand years old, but its acceptability depends on your audience, not any inherent realness of meaning.
The people who collectively decided what words mean centuries ago were not special. We are them, just with smartphones.
- perl4ever 6y agoIt is objectively bad when not-very-literate people guess that a rarer word means the same as a more familiar word that it sounds a bit like and drown out the people who made a distinction. That's because it is destroying useful tools for no gain. The word used to mean X, not Y, whereas now it's just a pretentious version of Y. "Decimate" may not be a terribly significant word to use/lose, but that's not a refutation of the pattern of loss that's degrading the language. Claiming it's just an arbitrary point of view is not correct. On the other hand, a lot of people don't grasp that when you Google a word, you likely do not find all the definitions that are in a decent dictionary, so it seems like the misinformation is fairly balanced between ignoring distinctions and making up distinctions/restrictions that didn't exist in the first place.
- jrockway 6y agoWell, the problem is there are still people around that would assume the old meaning is meant, so you can't convey meaning by using the word when it's in the weird transitional state. That, to me, just kills the word.