Oh Hey There

Ugh.

Please don’t use the feeble defence of sloppy usage - “Oh it’s a living language”.

Yes, it is a living language. So kindly refrain from killing it.

Words are the way we define our interactions with one another and with the past. If we allow words that have specific meanings to acquire other meanings then we introduce confusion and decrease the utility of the language.

For example, if you were to read an account of the recapture of Villers-Bretonneaux which said that advancing forces were decimated, then how would you know what was actually meant? How many died? 10%? 70%?

Decimated and devastated sound similar. They don’t mean the same thing.

Emphasis mine. “If we allow…”: But we do allow words to take on new meanings. We’ve always allowed words to do this. Logically then, the true antecedent implies that we have “introduced confusion and decreased the utility of the language”. I don’t know about you but as an English speaker I don’t wander around confused by my language and I never feel like my language has lost its utility. If anything, semantic language change adds more utility to the language as the new meanings adapt the word for new times.

Let me put that another way: You claim that “Words are the way we define our interactions with one another and with the past.” Well then, a word’s change of meaning reflects our relationship with the past. The “sloppy usage” of using decimate to mean to kick ass instead of the etymological meaning of “kill one in every ten” reflects a change: Namely, we don’t go around barbarically* executing one in every ten. I’m glad we don’t need that meaning to talk about the here and now.

*To be clear, this is a “sloppy usage” of barbaric, since the original and sacrosanct meaning of the word is an outsider who doesn’t understand a tribe’s language and can only imitate it by going “bar bar”. (This is why in linguistics a barbarism refers to an error in morphology.)

Posted September 23, 2009 at 12:45pm in language linguistics English | Comments || home