Language is always changing. At one point ‘an apron’ was ‘a napron’ while words like ‘literally’ are no longer literally literal. What are some language battles that have been lost in living memory and what are some others you predict will soon occur?
Edit: Non-english examples very welcome!
“Decimating” no longer means killing ten percent as the Romans did; now it is used to mean the killing of a majority, so it’s close to the opposite of its original meaning.
I thought decimating meant reducing to a tenth, as in removing 90%?
No. It meant killing every tenth soldier in a line
The meaning is derived from the brutality of the act, not the proportion of people killed.
The “deci” prefix is just a coincidence then?
You’re being downvoted, but I suspect you’re actually correct. A note about the act of decimation: it wasn’t just killing every tenth soldier. It was that the other nine soldiers were forced to kill the tenth. It was an absolutely brutal act where soldiers were forced to kill their friends and comrades.
It makes sense that saying an act is as brutal as decimation would then come to replace the word itself over time. That happens pretty frequently in language evolution.
People really love to feel smug about others using words “wrong” for some reason. Let them. I don’t care.
I suppose the word “boomer” has changed meaning very quickly. It rarely gets used anymore to refer to actual boomers (people born just after WW2) and instead now can refer either vaguely to anyone older than 30, or anyone with an antiquated/problematic notion of social norms.
We were always supposed to put punctuation inside quotation marks; however, now it seems to be the user’s choice of inside or outside. And I have to admit that most of the time when I’m using quotes, it seems more logical to me to place the punctuation outside of them.
Yeah, I still feel like I’m supposed to, but frequently I think it makes more sense to pull it outside if it isn’t part of the quote. Putting it in the quotation makes it seem like it’s associated with the quotation, when it may not be.
You know, I actually prefer that it be variable, but only when it serves a purpose.
Like, if Im quoting someone “I might want to indicate that they completed a sentence.”, but also continue beyond it.
For me, i make peace with this by thinking, the rules are one way for writing dialog, and perhaps another way when needing to convey the exactness of a quote.
YES! That’s basically my same reasoning.
Australian English language is now largely Americanised, a process that started in the post-war era is now mostly complete.
- Terms such as ‘gaol’ have been widely replaced by ‘jail’.
- ‘Programme’ is mostly replaced by ‘program’.
- A ‘car bonnet’ is likely to be called a ‘hood’.
- ‘Play lunch’ is mostly replaced with ‘recess’.
- ‘Pusher’ is mostly called a ‘pram’
- ‘Lacker band’ is now mostly just ‘rubber band’.
- ‘Boomer’ no longer means kangaroo, but instead ‘Old person.’
I’m not really bothered by it or anything, but it’s been interesting to see it shift even over my lifetime.
Elden Ring is trying to bring the spelling back to “gaol.”
Americans don’t use pram though, we say stroller
I’d say pram is still pretty British (“I have to push the pram-a-lot!”) in the US it would be almost definitely stroller.
“begging the question”. it’s not the same as “bringing up a question”, it means assuming your conclusion is true in the course of an argument
To be fair, that original meaning is illogical (as in, the meaning doesn’t follow from the literal words used), so it’s not surprising that people misused it to have a more logical meaning.
(wiki says) it comes from Greek to Latin to English in the 16th century, so I’m sure it suffers a bit in modern transfusion.
Loose and lose might as well be the same word these days. Drives me up a damn wall.
That and “POV” doesn’t mean what it used to mean anymore. Also drives me up a wall.
Is it not “point of view”?
What…what does POV mean now??
POV: I am confused
wait what is that supposed to mean? (i’m not a native english speaker, might be why i don’t get it)
Just demonstrating an incorrect use of POV 😅
“Drives me up the wall” becoming “drives me up a wall”.
Hey, maybe they have a specific wall up which they are driven!
Literally is still understood, it just gets misused.
Going in a bit of a different direction, emojis and things like /s are well understood now, which is an addition.
I wonder if some day in the future emojis will make their way from casual conversation into business? I guess I already use things like 👍 in semi formal work chats - it’s especially useful as a way of ensuring a message isn’t read sarcastically or passive aggressively. LLMs seem more than happy to plop an emoji or two into a document.
Speaking of AI I’m already noticing that poor spelling, slang and the like are almost signifiers of a human. I wonder if ways of talking that distinguish us from AI will become more common or more valuable?
In my country, a lot of my peers (me too) use stickers (the cute ones) in in-company-chats usually with people we know like colleagues and managers
So I assume emojis are also done?
Actually, when I think about it. I rarely see people complaining about emojis at work. Ironically if there’s one place that people hate emojis it’s Reddit or Lemmy 😅.
Do you speak another language than English? I’d be fascinated to know if similar language battles are happening in other languages.
I still feel like that one is a flavour-of-the-month adjustment - “literally” as an intensifier is already being replaced by “lowkey”, “deadass” etc…
Not exactly what you’re asking, but double spaces after ends of sentences.
I still use them. I find it makes reading and finding sentences easier in a paragraph. There was a study that it had an impact
Ain’t ain’t a word.
It is now.
Pronouns getting weird, especially when and is added, like “for him and I” or “her and I’s house”.
Also excetera for etcetera and mischievious for mischievous
I get irrationally angry any time I hear “I’s”. I can tolerate most other grammar issues, but something about that particular butchery of English drives me up the wall.
Would you rather prefer i’s or mine’s?
It’s just indolence.
It’s like people who put an S on the end of ‘e-mail’ to pluralize it.
also i fear that “comfort” is losing the battle to “comfortability”
That makes me very uncomfortabilityable
I miss double spaces after periods.
LUXURY!BACKINMYDAYWEDIDNTHAVESPACES.DONTGETMESTARTEDONTHISLOWERCASENONSENSE
We…don’t do this anymore? I can’t even recall what I’ve been doing for this for the last 20 years.
Autocorrect on Microsoft products turns double-space into single space by default. Gotta turn that shit of every time, it’s very frustrating.
It annoys me when people put double spaces after periods, but i guess it was necessary in the typrewiter days? Idk
Don’t do that unless it’s a monotype font, please.
Sincerely, typesetters everywhere.
Our browser is going to fingerprint us through this habit and we’re going to get served knee replacement ads because of it.
We were taught single space in the mid 90s, so that can’t be too recent.
I was taught two spaces in the 90s and didn’t find out it’s changed until maybe a couple years ago.
Print publishing has 500 years of convention built on trial and error.
As a person who learned to type on a typewriter, and then became a typesetter and publisher, and now does a lot of editing, double spaces are only of use in a monospace type face where there is no kerning possible.
Otherwise, type with variable spaces between the letters plus variable letter sizes is physically harder to read when there are extra gaps between the sentences, despite the way you were trained (by boomers, probably) to type.
i’ve never learnt to use tildes in spanish lol i mean i know some rules for that but i just never cared, most people dont use them while texting unless the corrector adds it.
People no longer double-space after sentences. No one cares that further compares metaphorical distance and farther compares physical distance. Most people seem to think that joining two independent clauses with a comma (a comma splice) is just fine. Things are now done on accident instead of by accident. Compute used to be something you did; now, it’s something you rent. People seem to have given up on less being used for uncountable things and fewer for countable things. Now they just use less for everything. People these days are enamored ‘by’ something instead of with it (or of it, for our British friends).
In US usage, it used to be that a situation could be “fraught with” complications, or hidden meaning, or difficulty, but it had to be “fraught with” something.
These days, the British style of saying that the situation is simply “fraught” seems to be way more popular than before.
Efficiency at work i guess. Maybe some cunning linguist can explain.
