this post was submitted on 21 Oct 2023
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[โ€“] zifnab25@hexbear.net 4 points 2 years ago (13 children)

language changes over time

But the root of a word does not.

EDIT: This can be frustrating when we expect consistency or scientific precision

At some point, it is okay to hear a teenager use a term incorrectly and mention the derivation of the term.

[โ€“] Tachanka@hexbear.net 5 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (5 children)

you can correct a teenager or whatever, and they may or may not listen to you, but if they and the rest of their generation keep using a word how they understand it, then the word essentially changes definition, and the people who write the dictionaries are forced to update their dictionaries to reflect popular usage. This is how it's always worked, and it's why an English dictionary from 1600 has a lot of different meanings than an English dictionary from 2023. It's why you can see a word often has way different meaning in its etymology than it does from its current use. Even important words. not tryna give you a hard time. I've just been told that, if people collectively start using a word differently, it can decouple from its etymology. I can think of plenty of examples

  • "naughty" in the 1300s used to mean you didn't have stuff, i.e. you had naught. You were impoverished. Then it came to mean that you didn't have morals (in a serious way), then it came to mean you were simply badly behaved (i.e. not in a serious way, like a child), then it started to get associated with its various sexual meanings in the 1860s.
  • "Spinster" used to mean a woman who spins thread. Now it is almost exclusively used to refer to an unmarried woman, whether or not she spins thread for a living.
  • "guy" in English used to mean "a grotesque or poorly dressed person", and was associated with effigies of Guy Fawkes that protestants used to burn. Only in the US in the 1800s did it start to refer to men in general, and now, in modern times, we often use it as a gender neutral term when applied to a group: "you guys wanna get lunch?" can often be directed at an intersex group.
  • "senile" used to simply mean old, not necessarily suffering from dementia
  • in old english "meat" used to refer to solid food in general, and not specifically animals.
  • awful used to mean "worthy of awe" (whether good or bad) and not simply "tremendously bad" i.e. the "awful power of God"
  • "silly" used to mean "happy, fortuitous, prosperous" then later came to mean "innocent, harmless, pitiable," then finally came to mean "weak, foolish, lacking in reason"

so if a bunch of teenagers decide that "boomer" means anyone 20 years older than them, then that's fine. They'll just have to accept becoming boomers themselves eventually tito-laugh

[โ€“] AssortedBiscuits@hexbear.net 2 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Descriptivism isn't the be all end all of what a word ought to mean. The easiest examples are slurs. For example, it doesn't matter if the vast majority of (cis) people do not consider the t-word to be a slur because frankly, their trash tier cis opinion doesn't matter. All that matter is trans people prescribe the t-word a slur, and whatever trans people prescribe it so, then it is so.

[โ€“] Tachanka@hexbear.net 4 points 2 years ago

boomer isn't a slur and that's what we were discussing

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