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!
“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.
I thought decimating meant reducing to a tenth, as in removing 90%?
No. It meant killing every tenth soldier in a line
The meaning is derived from the brutality of the act, not the proportion of people killed.
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.
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’.
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.
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?
“Piss over vulvas”? Not sure if that’s real.
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)
“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.
huh? i don’t think some_kind_of_guy is saying ‘POV’ means “I am confused” (is that how you understood the comment above?)
Just demonstrating an incorrect use of POV 😅
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Breathe and breath too…
Australian English language is now largely Americanised, a process that started in the post-war era is now mostly complete.
- Terms such as ‘gaol’ have been widely replaced by ‘jail’.
- ‘Programme’ is mostly replaced by ‘program’.
- A ‘car bonnet’ is likely to be called a ‘hood’.
- ‘Play lunch’ is mostly replaced with ‘recess’.
- ‘Pusher’ is mostly called a ‘pram’
- ‘Lacker band’ is now mostly just ‘rubber band’.
- ‘Boomer’ no longer means kangaroo, but instead ‘Old person.’
I’m not really bothered by it or anything, but it’s been interesting to see it shift even over my lifetime.
I’d say pram is still pretty British (“I have to push the pram-a-lot!”) in the US it would be almost definitely stroller.
Americans don’t use pram though, we say stroller
Yeah, pram is a British term. Or pushchair.
Y’all still got dual carriageways over there?
Is that an Australian-ism? I don’t remember it ever coming up in conversation with my American or British friends.
Yeah it’s a divided highway. I got directions once that included what I heard as a “jewel carriageway” and had just a very confusing time getting that clarified.
I don’t understand the pusher/pram one at all.
Bonnet
Australian
Uwotm8
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.
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 👍 in semi formal 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.
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 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.
Also an electroboom fan :p
I miss double spaces after periods.
LUXURY!BACKINMYDAYWEDIDNTHAVESPACES.DONTGETMESTARTEDONTHISLOWERCASENONSENSE
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.
I learned on a typewriter in '91, we got docked if we didn’t double space.
We…don’t do this anymore? I can’t even recall what I’ve been doing for this for the last 20 years.
Autocorrect on Microsoft products turns double-space into single space by default. Gotta turn that shit of every time, it’s very frustrating.
It annoys me when people put double spaces after periods, but i guess it was necessary in the typrewiter days? Idk
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.
Our browser is going to fingerprint us through this habit and we’re going to get served knee replacement ads because of it.
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.
“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.
This is one of those ones that’s different whether you’re in British English or American English.
The technical philosophical usage seems to mostly be on the British side of things.
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.
“This is the sort of bloody nonsense up with which I will not put.” - attributed to Churchill
The preposition one is what I came to say.
From my perspective, literally being used for emphasis does not actually change its meaning, it’s simply hyperbole.
If you complain that you’ve been “waiting for hours”, even though it’s been 45 minutes, that doesn’t change the meaning of “hours”, you’re just exaggerating.
Hyperbole is a stylistic element; style is a completely different level of language than grammar/spelling/semantics (word meanings). As another example of style, ending a sentence with a preposition is grammatically correct but stylistically not recommended.
“I’ve told you a million times, don’t exaggerate”
The OED actually includes the definition of literally as being what used to be the opposite of its definition nowadays, so I think that it does count as an auto-antonym (a word that means both itself, and the opposite of itself)
Us that technically a missing Oxford comma, or just a missing comma?
The grandma quote is a missing comma in general, but there’s another reply with a missing Oxford Comma.
Although punctuation is waning, I’m willing to spend the time to use it.
The rich couple, me and ScarJo donated ten thousand dollars to a local charity school.
Y’all make a cute couple but she’s doing the heavy lifting.
That’s typical of her relationships.
From my cold dead hands!!
People no longer double-space after sentences. No one cares that further compares metaphorical distance and farther compares physical distance. Most people seem to think that joining two independent clauses with a comma (a comma splice) is just fine. Things are now done on accident instead of by accident. Compute used to be something you did; now, it’s something you rent. People seem to have given up on less being used for uncountable things and fewer for countable things. Now they just use less for everything. People these days are enamored ‘by’ something instead of with it (or of it, for our British friends).
While not totally gone, German’s genitive case (which is used to show ownership) is becoming less and less common. They have both the genetive case as well as their equivalent of " 's " - which is just “s,” if you’re wondering. Example:
Der Herr der Ringe.
The Lord of the Rings. It would normally be “die Ringe,” but it becomes “der” in the genetive case.
Another transition in German is that the “formal you” is being used less and less frequently. I understand this is the case for a few other European languages as well.
Interesting! Thanks for a non english perspective. Is German language development Influenced by widespread english competency? Are Germans becoming less fussy about certain rules in favour of some of English’s simpler or more flexible constructs? (Not to suggest that English isn’t a Byzantine mess of a language itself!)
Unfortunately, I’m not a native German speaker. So, take this with a grain of salt.
I will say that the German language has always been open to loan words from other languages. And, according to my German teacher (who is native), the biggest change recently in that regard is NOT how loan words are accepted BUT how quickly they are accepted these days. New loan words are being added all the time, especially by young people. He said that generally the word will be accepted as it is at first, and then over time it well become more “germanified” and used more like native words. He said this process used to take decades but now it can happen in less than a year. An example of a germanified English loan word is “chatten” which means “to chat,” just like English. Ich chatte, du chattest, wir chatten. (I chat, you chat, we chat.)
I believe the simplification of grammatical structures (like the abandonment of genetive) has been going on slowly over centuries and is mostly unrelated to contact with English speakers. But, there is likely some influence there.
Really interesting stuff! It just goes to show that even without ‘authorities’ such as the French Language Academy, loan words end up becoming modified and molded by their adoptive language. I’m learning Japanese and it has so many loan words going all the way back to the dutch. Some are barely recognisable for example computer is パソコン = pasokon = personal computer.
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
would of literally their
Literally Literally
