this post was submitted on 24 Jul 2023
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People have been crying about language change in all languages since the dawn of speaking. You can look back to relatively recently with the Romans, they'd always complain about non-standard dialectal and colloquial speech and how the youth are ruining our language, or people from X geographical area are butchering Latin rather than using the standard dialect (Classical Latin).
It's no different today. People (upon political/cultural motivation) complain about using "they" as a gender-neutral singular pronoun, saying it's confusing (even though we've used it as a singular pronoun for those of unknown gender since "they" was borrowed into English), but don't bat an eye at "you" which was first a plural only (as opposed to singular "thou") and then gradually shifted to a formal singular pronoun, then to just the only second person pronoun for both numbers. People also complain about pronunciations of words like nuclear, asks, comfortable, etc.
The myth of mispronunciation is a plague upon human language.
It's not change itself that I hate, it's when the change makes language less useful. Example, "literally" meaning its opposite, "figuratively," through common misuse. "It was literally the million-dollar question" used to mean that it was a question that, if answered, would actually be worth a million dollars rather than figuratively meaning it was an important one to answer. Now it's unclear.
I like you, you get me. Adapting the language to serve the common denominator isn't great since the common denominator is generally an idiot. We, as a people, are fairly stupid on the whole. Codifying the literal opposite of a word into that words definition is reducing the clarity of the language, requiring further clarification for the uncertainty, suddenly a relatively terse statement becomes a long unwieldy mess of clarifications for all the idiosyncrasies of the words, since the words have so many contradictory meanings that the statement can be interpreted in any number of ways, instead of how it was intended.
Over time, the common meaning of terms has been diluted to the point where most statements need clarifying context to even be correctly understood.
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