Language is always changing. At one point ‘an apron’ was ‘a napron’ while words like ‘literally’ are no longer literally literal. What are some language battles that have been lost in living memory and what are some others you predict will soon occur?
Edit: Non-english examples very welcome!
Not exactly what you’re asking, but double spaces after ends of sentences.
I still use them. I find it makes reading and finding sentences easier in a paragraph. There was a study that it had an impact
Loose and lose might as well be the same word these days. Drives me up a damn wall.
That and “POV” doesn’t mean what it used to mean anymore. Also drives me up a wall.
Is it not “point of view”?
Yeah but it used to mean “piss over vulvas”. Pornhub changed the meaning to “point of view” and everyone just went with it.
Yeah, I remember an exchange I had, where someone asked what POV means I answered with Point of View and some spoiled Z started laughing, saying I outed myself, but as table top gamer… that was always the abbreviation we used.
And what does it mean for those people?
I assume that kid thought it was only for porn. Ironically, they are the ones who outed themselves, though who gives a shit? Everyone watches porn.
POV has meant point of view for far longer than porn has used it. I have no idea of the origins, but it’s old. I remember using it in English classes to describe how stories were written, for example, and I’m pretty sure it wasn’t a modern thing.
Correct, correct. I don’t really have good memories of that place due to some other reasons.
“Drives me up the wall” becoming “drives me up a wall”.
What…what does POV mean now??
POV: I am confused
wait what is that supposed to mean? (i’m not a native english speaker, might be why i don’t get it)
Just demonstrating an incorrect use of POV 😅
“Demonstrating my point of view: I am confused”
thanks
I’m still confused? It’s not Point of View, it’s Confused Point of View?
They gave that as an example. POV just seems to be used an an unnecessary prefix to stating an opinion.
A bit like to “useless ‘nobody:’” line before a meme caption.
“begging the question”. it’s not the same as “bringing up a question”, it means assuming your conclusion is true in the course of an argument
To be fair, that original meaning is illogical (as in, the meaning doesn’t follow from the literal words used), so it’s not surprising that people misused it to have a more logical meaning.
(wiki says) it comes from Greek to Latin to English in the 16th century, so I’m sure it suffers a bit in modern transfusion.
“Decimating” no longer means killing ten percent as the Romans did; now it is used to mean the killing of a majority, so it’s close to the opposite of its original meaning.
The meaning is derived from the brutality of the act, not the proportion of people killed.
The “deci” prefix is just a coincidence then?
More like a vague gesture, which, in idiom chock-full of metonymy, is legitimate.
You’re being downvoted, but I suspect you’re actually correct. A note about the act of decimation: it wasn’t just killing every tenth soldier. It was that the other nine soldiers were forced to kill the tenth. It was an absolutely brutal act where soldiers were forced to kill their friends and comrades.
It makes sense that saying an act is as brutal as decimation would then come to replace the word itself over time. That happens pretty frequently in language evolution.
People really love to feel smug about others using words “wrong” for some reason. Let them. I don’t care.
I thought decimating meant reducing to a tenth, as in removing 90%?
No. It meant killing every tenth soldier in a line
Presently used to mean “soon” or “in a bit” but now means “happening right now”
The meaning of bemused is similar to “befuddled”, but it’s more often used as if it means “amused”
It used to be a firm rule that you mustn’t end a sentence in a proposition.
The preposition one is what I came to say.
“This is the sort of bloody nonsense up with which I will not put.” - attributed to Churchill
Literally and Crescendo are my vocabulary pet peeves. Both have stupidly evolved to include definitions that mean the exact opposite of their true meanings.
Literally is annoying, but Crescendo is impossible. That is a specific musical term with an unalterable meaning. It means a gradual increase in volume, but it has come to mean a climax. Something will be described as “it rose to a crescendo,” and that is simply wrong. Something can crescendo to a climax, but not the other way around. If you change it to mean the climax, you can’t crescendo to a crescendo, s what’s the word for gradually increasing the volume?
Besides, it’s a musical term, and musicians will define musical terms, not illiterate civilians.
And if Literally can also mean “similar to,” then what word can be used to literally mean Literally?
That’s it, I’m going to start using “It rose to a fortissississimo”!
And don’t get me started on how the Pianoforte is just called the piano now, leaving out half of its loudness range smh.
Literally is still understood, it just gets misused.
Going in a bit of a different direction, emojis and things like /s are well understood now, which is an addition.
It’s funny, quite a few misguided souls on the threadiverse seem to think that the /s is implied.
On the internet, it never is. That’s why we invented it.
I wonder if some day in the future emojis will make their way from casual conversation into business? I guess I already use things like thumbs up in semi work chats - it’s especially useful as a way of ensuring a message isn’t read sarcastically or passive aggressively. LLMs seem more than happy to plop an emoji or two into a document.
Speaking of AI I’m already noticing that poor spelling, slang and the like are almost signifiers of a human. I wonder if ways of talking that distinguish us from AI will become more common or more valuable?
In my country, a lot of my peers (me too) use stickers (the cute ones) in in-company-chats usually with people we know like colleagues and managers
So I assume emojis are also done?
Actually, when I think about it. I rarely see people complaining about emojis at work. Ironically if there’s one place that people hate emojis it’s Reddit or Lemmy 😅.
Do you speak another language than English? I’d be fascinated to know if similar language battles are happening in other languages.
Yes! Well, I am from India, so… I speak multiple languages with people who are comfortable in their own and yes, there is a lot of language battles in India too, especially Search up Hindi Imposition if you’re interested.
I still feel like that one is a flavour-of-the-month adjustment - “literally” as an intensifier is already being replaced by “lowkey”, “deadass” etc…
If so that’s great. Literally was taken; sometimes you’re trying to communicate something that sounds figurative, or like hyperbole, but it’s not.
I was one of the first years to have the new spelling rules.
It used to be, that a letter appearing more than twice in direct sequence would be cut to just twice. But that was lifted and is now just how many it should normally be. Examples: Schifffahrt, Brennnessel, Seeelefant.It used to be, that “dass” could also be spelt “daß”, but the rules for “ss” and “ß” were made clearer and more concise.
They also changed the way words could be split at the end of a line. If there was a double consonant in-between the syllables that were to split, the first syllable would take both consonants but now they are split evenly.
immer is split im-mer and not imm-er
But ck makes an exception: knackig is kna-ckig instead of old knak-kigI suppose the word “boomer” has changed meaning very quickly. It rarely gets used anymore to refer to actual boomers (people born just after WW2) and instead now can refer either vaguely to anyone older than 30, or anyone with an antiquated/problematic notion of social norms.
I miss double spaces after periods.
We…don’t do this anymore? I can’t even recall what I’ve been doing for this for the last 20 years.
Our browser is going to fingerprint us through this habit and we’re going to get served knee replacement ads because of it.
Autocorrect on Microsoft products turns double-space into single space by default. Gotta turn that shit of every time, it’s very frustrating.
Don’t do that unless it’s a monotype font, please.
Sincerely, typesetters everywhere.
Why not? I want to have more white space between my sentences than I do between words in the same sentence. I’m writing emails, business crap, and Lemmy posts; nothing that’s going to see any love from a typesetter. Is there some more appropriate way to get what I want than hitting the spacebar twice between sentences?
Well it’s okay to break rules, right? So long as you understand how and why.
Your version of readability skews from the norm established over centuries. Fine! Just don’t expect the rules to bend to you.
Readability for author and reader vary. Whose reading comprehension is more important? Your call.
In some cases, it might be appropriate to break paragraph convention and isolate important sentences.
It annoys me when people put double spaces after periods, but i guess it was necessary in the typrewiter days? Idk
LUXURY!BACKINMYDAYWEDIDNTHAVESPACES.DONTGETMESTARTEDONTHISLOWERCASENONSENSE
In pre-secondary education I was taught to double-space, but post I was told to single IIRC. I prefer single personally.
Interestingly, typing two spaces on my phone is replaced by a period and a single space. It’s like a vestigial mechanic from that practice. It’s aware of the context of what a double space was used for, but it serves a totally different purpose to not have to type a period.
We were taught single space in the mid 90s, so that can’t be too recent.
I was taught two spaces in the 90s and didn’t find out it’s changed until maybe a couple years ago.
It hasn’t changed, you were just taught an overly specific application and not taught that it was such.
Print publishing has 500 years of convention built on trial and error.
As a person who learned to type on a typewriter, and then became a typesetter and publisher, and now does a lot of editing, double spaces are only of use in a monospace type face where there is no kerning possible.
Otherwise, type with variable spaces between the letters plus variable letter sizes is physically harder to read when there are extra gaps between the sentences, despite the way you were trained (by boomers, probably) to type.
We were always supposed to put punctuation inside quotation marks; however, now it seems to be the user’s choice of inside or outside. And I have to admit that most of the time when I’m using quotes, it seems more logical to me to place the punctuation outside of them.
Yeah, I still feel like I’m supposed to, but frequently I think it makes more sense to pull it outside if it isn’t part of the quote. Putting it in the quotation makes it seem like it’s associated with the quotation, when it may not be.
We were always supposed to put punctuation inside quotation marks;
Isn’t this a US English thing? In India we were taught to close them like brackets - i.e., the one that opened last closes first. So
‘Don’t wait. I will come later.’
But
He said ‘I will come later’.
You know, I actually prefer that it be variable, but only when it serves a purpose.
Like, if Im quoting someone “I might want to indicate that they completed a sentence.”, but also continue beyond it.
For me, i make peace with this by thinking, the rules are one way for writing dialog, and perhaps another way when needing to convey the exactness of a quote.
YES! That’s basically my same reasoning.
Apple put the nail in the coffin for adverbs when “Think different” let illiterates think they were speaking correctly.
*speaking correct
.
I’m so sorry; I couldn’t help myself
Ain’t ain’t a word.
It is now.
People using then instead of than. I never saw that 30 years ago.
Plenty of bad grammar and speling to go around.
30 years ago fewer people with literacy problems were publicly and obsessively defacing literary norms.
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In US usage, it used to be that a situation could be “fraught with” complications, or hidden meaning, or difficulty, but it had to be “fraught with” something.
These days, the British style of saying that the situation is simply “fraught” seems to be way more popular than before.
Efficiency at work i guess. Maybe some cunning linguist can explain.
