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> But what I don't get is being all offended that someone is trying to change language on the basis of "language is always changing." I think the offensive par
by tokenrove 12y ago
> But what I don't get is being all offended that someone is trying to change language on the basis of "language is always changing."
I think the offensive part comes from the implication that one way is right and one way is wrong.
- Flimm 12y agoSo it's wrong to say that one way is right and one way is wrong? ... ad nauseum
- SilasX 12y agoIt's not (merely) about right vs wrong, but about "destroys useful symmetries" vs doesn't, or "makes language less useful" vs doesn't. If people start to use "up" to mean "down", that defeats the purpose of having words for them. If a term's very existence is to provide a context-free way to disambiguate, it will be a pain when people expect you to infer the real meaning from context (cf literally). In programming, if you accept some new idioms, but those make it hard to see if a given line of code mutates state, that will create pain for you down the line, even if it's "just the evolution of the language".