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this post was submitted on 15 Sep 2023
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People constantly try to argue with me that language isn't degrading, it's just changing. Those people of course don't know anything about language. It's not even that the degradation of language is new; but it's definitely happening all the time, as people in day-to-day life make constant assumptions about what words mean, those assumptions catch on, and our wordpool becomes more and more homogeneous all the time.
Here's an example. A lot of people are confusing "pity" with "contempt" now and think "pity" is a bad word. It is not only not a bad word, but we don't have a convenient 1:1 replacement for it either.
So what I'm saying is happening is that people are making stupid assumptions about the meanings of words, and that makes us lose words that convey specific and unique ideas, with no 1:1 replacements for those words. Instead, what happens is language becomes more homogeneous as we keep turning unique words into ones that mean something we already have other words for. We already have a lot of words for "awesome", we don't need to lose the real meanings of "epic" or "ultimate" for that. We already have "coincidence", we don't need "irony" to lose meaning for that. We already have a word for "indeed", we don't need "literally" to lose meaning for that. We already have lots of words for "stupid person", we don't need "dumb", "nimrod", or "autistic" to lose meaning for that. The list goes on.
Here's another example. We have a ton of words for "stupid person". "Nimrod" is known for one thing-- being stated as a great hunter in the book of Genesis, and nothing else. Bugs Bunny once called Elmer Fudd "a poor Nimrod", and people just assumed Bugs was insulting him. That is why people think "nimrod" means "stupid" when it in fact meant "hunter". That's how language degrades-- by ignorant assumption where people turn words with a nuanced meaning into words that have a meaning that we already have lots of words for.