ALT TEXT:
- Panel 1: A person with the text “Singular ‘they’” written on them smiling with open arms.
- Panel 2: “Singular ‘They’” beaten up by others who said, “Singular they is ungrammatical. It’s too confusing,” “How can anyone use plural pronouns for singular,” and “Every pronoun should only have one purpose.”
- Panel 3: “You” hiding from the mob who was beating “Singular ‘They’”
- Panel 4: “German ‘Sie’” hiding with even more fear next to “You”
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It’s not change itself that I hate, it’s when the change makes language less useful. Example, “literally” meaning its opposite, “figuratively,” through common misuse. “It was literally the million-dollar question” used to mean that it was a question that, if answered, would actually be worth a million dollars rather than figuratively meaning it was an important one to answer. Now it’s unclear.
I like you, you get me. Adapting the language to serve the common denominator isn’t great since the common denominator is generally an idiot. We, as a people, are fairly stupid on the whole. Codifying the literal opposite of a word into that words definition is reducing the clarity of the language, requiring further clarification for the uncertainty, suddenly a relatively terse statement becomes a long unwieldy mess of clarifications for all the idiosyncrasies of the words, since the words have so many contradictory meanings that the statement can be interpreted in any number of ways, instead of how it was intended.
Over time, the common meaning of terms has been diluted to the point where most statements need clarifying context to even be correctly understood.
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Care to give examples?
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No, examples of words that mean two opposite things at the same time, since you apparently said that every single word in existence has always been that way. “Bad” comes to mind, though it’s a lot easier to tell from context which meaning it has compared to “literally.”
Another non-english example would be the german word “umfahren” which can mean both driving around or over something, depending on context
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Or extensive, originally meant spread out, but is also used for comprehensive.
I don’t disagree with you, but the changes I tend to have a problem with, as samus12345 pointed out, is that it robs the statement of clarity. I just want language, any language, to be as specific as it can, so that misunderstandings are minimized because the words used have specific definitions, which are all similar. Instead of the contradictory definitions many words seem to have.
It’s by far not the majority of words that have this problem, but it’s definitely a non-trivial number of them that do.
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