1. 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.

Notes

  1. jaggedfragments reblogged this from tristn-prime and added:
    dead. :) My peeve (not...intentional shorthand you mentioned, which
  2. jaggedfragments reblogged this from tristn and added:
    your literate response. I don’t think...speakers, since it can honestly
  3. tristn reblogged this from jaggedfragments and added:
    jaggedfragments in response...this post of mine:
  4. jaggedfragments reblogged this from tristn and added:
    Time for another opinion… and a correction. If you want to get a sense of how confusing the evolution of language gets,...
  5. jenniferanne reblogged this from tristn and added:
    morphology. Tristn totally owns this argument. Hey, I guess my use of the term ‘own’ is sloppy. It’s impossible to ‘own’...
  6. tristn reblogged this from indefensible and added:
    Emphasis mine. “If we allow…”: But we do allow words to take on new meanings. We’ve always allowed words to do this....
  7. nostrich reblogged this from indefensible and added:
    So I guess you’d also never...word “alright,” since