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Comment by michaelochurch | Hacker News Reader

Upvote back to +1, just because I think it's interesting how words fairly arbitrarily acquire strong signed (positive or negative) meanings, e.g. awful vs. awesome, collaboration vs. collusion. It's not at all stable across languages. If you call someone a "collabo" (collaborator) in France, that's a huge insult (referring to Nazi collaborators in the Vichy era).

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I think my comment is valid and on-topic. People make fun of conspiracy theories, but the fact is that conspiracies go on all the time. There is even a crime called "conspiracy", after all. It would be better to say "implausible crank theories" or something when that is what one refers to.

Thank you for bringing this fact up. "conspiracy to commit x" is an extremely common charge in our legal system.

The Orwellification of the word is such that, only when we try to apply this term to the powerful do we suddenly become crazy kooks, despite the fact that the powerful are often the ones with the motive, and certainly the means, to engage in conspiracy.

I find it amusing when well-meaning people try to dictate what a given word or phrase should mean. Language evolves in a chaotic way, often against logical arguments. You might be right, but "conspiracy theory" already has an established meaning, and you are not going to change that.

Sure, but that also means I am free to try and re-re-define words back to their origin as well :)

Indeed, you are free to. On occasion I've tried to do the same thing. But in practice, I don't think it usually helps. It muddies up the waters of conversation, which depend on everyone having roughly the same definitions of words. At least, you have to be careful, and know that most people won't (immediately) change, and that you're making things more complicated.

It's important to have clear and powerful linguistics. Sticky linguistics make sticky minds. Compare inuits, with their multitude of words for snow - they probably have richer and clearer discussions on snow.

The same thing is true in programming languages - eg people who go back to basics and throw out the cached thoughts that make up a web of assumptions that everyone clings to, and in the process create something weird yet powerful (like Haskell or whatever).

I know, but bringing up alternatives to entrenched meanings doesn't always make things clearer. Probably a lot of the time it's better to introduce a new term, or one that is used infrequently and doesn't have as much baggage, rather then redefining one. Redefining terms when talking to a computer is one thing, but people aren't always capable of throwing out their assumptions, and it almost always takes a long time. In the meantime, where is the discussion? The mess has to be worth it.

Allow me to interject for a due correction: the inuit "having x>>1 words for snow" is a widespread misconception; Eskimo-Aleut languages feature compounding (as German does), thus allowing an arbitrarily high number of variations of the "snow" lexeme, which can be misunderstood by very uninformed and very monolinguistic individuals (such as lousy journalists writing fillers) as being different words.

The latest xkcd[1] sums it up pretty well.

[1] http://xkcd.com/1010/

But by the same facile reasoning where modern linguistic norms are ignored in favor of older, simpler roots, "crank" just means "turn," and turning is often a good thing.

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