Semantic Drift | Hacker News Reader

Semantic Drift

harpers.org

59 pointsdrjohnson59 comments

> “Literally” now means “really".

Amusing to see my main argument against "literally" pedants being used directly in the complaint of one.

"Really", "truly", "actually", "absolutely" and a bunch of other similar words should literally indicate the same thing as literally, that something is "real", "true", "actual" as opposed to "metaphorical" or otherwise exagerrated but now all have that meaning faded to just emphasis.

If you can accept that then there's no real reason to not accept literally going the same way. If anything "literally" is a lot weaker a claim than "really" or "truly" yet "really killed last night" or "truly shocking" get a pass where "literally" wouldn't.

Plus the other main use of "literally" is "look out, here comes a clever pun", which even as a fan of puns I'm not sure is a great loss.

Of course the author is playing with the very things she criticises, and other people’s linguistic peeves. Just look at how she ends the article on a split infinitive.

I'm not so sure. She does specifically mention that one earlier as a convention she doesn't care about or follow and does seem to wrestle with her own knowledge that the things she does care about are basically pointless, but still takes them seriously.

English is so confusing you can easily read too much into it (eg. was she intentionally playing with the dual meanings of abysmal (terrible vs deep)? I don't think so, but couldn't swear to it.

Well, she explicitly says that the question of split infinitives leaves her „nonplussed“, which I read as a deliberate play.

That’s an obvious joke but it’s right in the middle of a section about things she is ok with but the generation prior to her wasn’t. It would be bad writing if she weren’t actually serious about those things.

To be pedantic, if you mean this sentence:

> But surely there’s a tattered nobility to valiantly fighting wars that we know we can’t win.

That's not a split infinitive. It's just a regular proposition "to" attached to a gerund phrase(?) modified by "valiantly".

The common pattern among all of these is that they are hyperbolic.

You can see the same with "awesome", "terrible", and "horrible".

I think people just really like intensifiers, and then they overuse them until they no longer have their original intensity, so they move onto the next word.

Agreed. In fact, the use of "literally" as an intensifier isn't all that new: Twain, Fitzgerald, Austen, and others used it that way too. https://slate.com/human-interest/2005/11/the-trouble-with-li...

>“Literally” now means “really,” or, worse, “figuratively.” (Anyone claiming that “my head literally exploded” would not have lived to tell the tale.)

Now "now", since centuries. Get on with the program. Several other words are their own antonyms, including "dust" (to clean up dust or add dust), "oversight" (to supervise, but also the result of lack of supervision), "clip" (attach but also cut off), etc.

Acting as if context doesn’t exist is repeating weird motif of this genre of dignified dusty outrage.

Using these words in a context where the context doesn’t make its meaning clear is a bad, sure, but other usage is quite unproblematic.

Plus, even the context-free use allows for interesting puns, non-committal ("diplomatic") responses, and so on.

If all words had that problem, sure it would be bad. But some words needing extra context to disambiguate is not a real problem (nor a new phenomenon).

In fact we even have it in parsers, where it helps to make syntax lighter and more pleasant (at the cost of complicating the parsing rule).

As a non native speaker, my biggest gripe is that words which meanth the same thing have diverged.

For example, "egregiously" meant "very well" and "egregiamente" still does in Italian. But in English, it now means "very badly".

At the same time, people who spend a lot of time using English end up reimporting words with the same root into my own language when we already have something (e.g. the word spelled "decade" in Italian means "ten things" while the semantically equivalent "ten years" is "decennio", but some people will now commonly use the former to mean the latter because they just mock English)

Latin words mostly came to English through Norman French after William the Conqueror and his followers became ruling class in 1066. In the intervening thousand years there was a lot of time for the meanings to diverge and invert.

English is particularly rich in false friends and loanwords because of its hybrid origins. Only recently has it begun to export words back out to other languages (eg. "le weekend").

Actually quite a lot of the Latin and Greek words came several centuries after the Norman invasion as renaissance scholars introduced them — often to ‘correct’ French words. Then quite a lot more came through scientific terms in the industrial era.

Yes, I should've mentioned them rather than sweeping it all under loanwords.

"Egregiously" is interesting. Your definition matches my OED. But "egregious" also has the original meaning from Latin "egregius" which is literally something that stands out from a flock (for example of sheep), hence remarkably good.

"University" is another confusing derivation. It's common to ascribe it to classical Latin "universitas" which means "universe" and implies a university teaches all things. Actually though the OED, the Cambridge Medieval History, and Wikipedia agree that when first applied in the middle ages "universitas" had the meaning of society or guild and applied to the faculty plus students of institutions like Bologna or Padua. [1]

At the risk of flogging a dead horse it's all egregiously confusing. I think I got that right.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University

Even better, some words have directly contradictory meanings in different dialects of English. In the context of a meeting, to table something means to not discuss it at this meeting, or it means to ensure that it is on the agenda and is discussed at this meeting, all depending on whether you are influenced by American or Commonwealth English

Relates to the usual debate of whether the language ought to remain in the form that was crystallized at a given moment, or accept the transformation contemporary users are making.

I used to not care, but having read some Chomsky lately, it seems that some of those semantics transformations are made to serve an agenda - and now I feel that battling for stability has some sense.

Kind of like trying to use the language as the unit for ideas, you might want to have the language as a stable reference frame so that everyone understands those ideas.

On the other hand language has been used for millennia as a way to exclude people. Think Oxford English or "standard" American as a marker for class, for instance. I'm fine with linguistic change if it leads to us being more accepting of others.

> Relates to the usual debate of whether the language ought to remain in the form that was crystallized at a given moment, or accept the transformation contemporary users are making.

That is a false dichotomy in my opinion. If you see language as a tool then the most relevant characteristic is not stability of fluidity, but usefulness. Language changes because we are (subtly) using is differently, some of these changes are sometimes actually many different competing mutations or are just born out of "I need a new word for this".

Hear, hear!

Although I'm a curmudgeon at heart, I'm trying to help my children internalize the fact that "correct" language evolves. Learn the right meaning, syntax, pronunciation, and idioms so you don't sound uneducated, but realize that people may differ in their perception of "correct" or acceptable.

"Be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others." (Comma-splice noted)

I just had a similar conversation with my daughter about the entomology of a word that you would never use today, but was in relatively common use when I was a kid. It's kind of amazing how (living) languages mutate.

Normally I wouldn't ask, but since it's related to the topic at hand, did you mean to pull a https://xkcd.com/1012/?

Ha! No, but thank you for the smile. (For folks who didn't catch it, I meant to say "etymology".)

That was fun to read. I’m happy she mentioned nonplussed since, as a non-native speaker, I never quite grasped its meaning. Now I understand why.

Wait until you try to use "sanction" (especially as a verb, where the different meanings are close to opposite). [1] The verb "table" is another one with opposite meanings. [2]

The English language appears designed to foil friend and foe alike.

[1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/sanction

[2] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/table

The dual meaning of sanction seems to be on every language that imported it from Latin. I imagine is remotes to the Romans.

Anyway, both meanings are a positive administrative act, where an executive does the thing he usually does. The different meanings usually don't mix on the same context.

Reminds me of how nonplussed has been redefined to mean the opposite of its original meaning. Fine for the language to evolve but we need to stop that sort of thing. It's super confusing now whenever someone uses nonplussed. Which meaning are they using?

Yeah, sadly most people could care less and it’s literally the worst.

comprised of

supposably comprised of.

Definately.

I get that alot.

its

An Australian, I was nonplussed by this claim, so I had to look it up. And indeed, https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/nonplussed#Adjective:

> Bewildered; unsure how to respond or act. [from 17th c.]

> (proscribed, US, informal) Unfazed, unaffected, or unimpressed. [from 20th c.]

Huh. And then https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Glossary#proscribed is fun. But then, both “nonplussed” and “proscribed” are weird words where if you used them in a sentence and asked someone unfamiliar with them to guess their meaning they’d tend to guess quite the wrong direction. Something like this: “I guess ‘nonplussed’ means ‘not plussed’ like… not… benefited by? And ‘proscribed’, ‘pro-’ means in favour of and ‘scribed’ means written, so I suppose it means this is the way you should write it.”

Native speaker here, I actually had no idea people used "nonplussed" to mean "unfazed".

Lay/laid as their ‘descent to barbarism’ makes me scared what they’d say about me..

I'm sure it's a little bit tongue-in-cheek.

The whole article is a little hyperbolic, but the distinction is important. To "lie" is to position one's own self, while to "lay" is to position some grammatical object. Confusingly, "I will lay myself down" is grammatically correct, because "myself" serves as the object.

There are situations in which using the wrong verb conveys a different meaning. "Please lie down on the floor" is a request to put yourself horizontally on the floor, while "please lay down on the floor" is a request to spread soft feathers underfoot.

"Racist" and "Nazi" are headed the same way. This frustrates the hell out of me as these are both terms that should be used for the highest level of condemnation, not something to just smear your political opponents.

I'm the opposite, "Nazis" seem to have turned into saturday morning cartoon villains, who sneeringly laugh as they plan to destroy the world, and one-off aberations that can never happen again rather than rather fairly standard fascists who got a whole bunch of people killed in the usual way that fascists do.

But I am reading "It Can't Happen Here" right now, so maybe I'm biased by that. It's certainly confusing reading a book written in 1935 that talks about the Nazis without full knowledge of what was to follow and think "this could be taken straight from today" as well as realising that it wasn't even extreme satire at the time, but rather mostly based on Huey Long and other real figures.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It_Can%27t_Happen_Here

Wow, reading that wikipedia article I'm amazed to find out the sci-fi television series V started out as an adaptation of It Can't Happen Here.

Mind. Blown.

I think we are actually in agreement.

"It can't happen here" was written after the rise of the Nazis so it not that surprising that it appears prescient. The same forces that gave rise to the Nazis in Germany were present in many countries in 1935 including the USA.

Looking to the past can be very dangerous. Yes it helps to know history, but the conditions that gave rise to Nazism were conditional on the time. History can lead us astray and cause us worry about things that don't really matter and miss the new things that do.

>> so it not that surprising that it appears precedent.

prescient, right?

Usually I would not have bothered, but given the context...

Yes. Forgive me I am in Australia tapping away on my iPad and it is getting late :)

No worries. And thank you Australia for bringing that expression to our language.

Nazis were nazis long before they put people into gas chambers. If we’re waiting to draw the comparison until the tanks are already metaphorically rolling into Poland, it’s rather useless.

Also, if you find your political beliefs compared to nazism and fascism more than you’re comfortable with that is probably a sign that you should re-examine those beliefs.

Who said I have been called a nazi?

I object to theses terms being thrown around like candy at a children's party to the point where they have almost lost all meaning. Right now if someone under the age of 90 is called a nazi it is almost certain that they are not a nazi.

> “He means fewer water” or “She means less bottles.”

This is wrong. “Fewer” is for quantities (i.e. countable things) whereas “less” is for a singular mass.

You're missing the sarcasm. The full quote:

> Thus on the rare occasions these adjectives are actually deployed accurately on TV, my husband and I will interject mischievously, “He means fewer water” or “She means less bottles.”

Apparently this was never a rule except in textbooks, like splitting infinitives, ending sentences with prepositions, typesetting ordinal suffixes ("th" etc) in superscript, and always putting punctuation inside of quotation marks.

I'm confused what you mean. As a native speaker, these are definitely rules. As your parent comment says (missing the sarcasm of the article), these examples sound (and are) wrong.

Now imagine being a non-native English speaker brought up on an all-you-can-eat regime of cultural imperialist dishes but outside of the y'all-o-sphere. Should we follow down the 'Ow my balls' rabbit hole or just bifurcate?

I imagine that maybe this was the point, but I'm a non-native English speaker and I do not understand a single part of your comment.

I'm a native English speaker, and I don't either.

Translation:

>all-you-can-eat regime of cultural imperialist dishes

American movies/TV/books etc. written by skilled professionals with formal English education.

>the y'all-o-sphere

Casual English users with no idea what a direct object is.

>the 'Ow my balls' rabbit hole

A world like the movie "Idiocracy", where a TV show about hitting people in the balls is considered highbrow entertainment.

>or just bifurcate?

Or risk becoming incomprehensible to the masses.

What can I say. Humour does not appear to be one of my talents. Thanks for the translation though. Spot on.

I think you did very well, and I didn't get it without the explanation.

I found it compactly hilarious.

Article has an autoplay video absolutely-positio oned ad where the close button is so tiny that clicking on loads the ad page instead of closing.

Article has a second fly out ad after you start scrolling.

Article has a fixed layout with tiny font.

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