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!
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).
Unique coming to just mean unusual.
Ending sentences with propositions, and getting them jumbled around. My work does it in their advertisements and i cry every time.
“See what classes you can register for.” Or modifying it to be worse; “see what classes you can register for fast”
propositions
Hey sexy mama, wanna kill all humans?
LOL I’m gonna leave it that way 🤣
“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.
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.
The “deci” prefix is just a coincidence then?
More like a vague gesture, which, in idiom chock-full of metonymy, is legitimate.
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.
Y’all still got dual carriageways over there?
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.
Elden Ring is trying to bring the spelling back to “gaol.”
‘Programme’ is mostly replaced by ‘program’.
We can still pronounce it correctly (with an O like ‘pronounce’ or ‘proclaim’) so there’s that
Far as I’ve ever seen, that’s how everyone pronounces it.
Yes, but we got the good aussie slang!
Like, “no worries”. Fucking love it.
I don’t understand the pusher/pram one at all.
Bonnet
Australian
Uwotm8
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’.
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.
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.
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.
From my cold dead hands!!
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.
Ain’t ain’t a word.
It is now.
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.
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.
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 😅
“Drives me up the wall” becoming “drives me up a wall”.
This drives me up that wall
Hey, maybe they have a specific wall up which they are driven!
deleted by creator
Breathe and breath too…
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
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)
I agree, but there was a period in the '00s, or maybe early '10s, where the meaning was changing because you only ever saw it mean “figuratively”, to the point where dictionaries included both meanings. I think it’s settled back to its original meaning now though.
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 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 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
“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.
I miss double spaces after periods.
We were taught single space in the mid 90s, so that can’t be too recent.
I learned on a typewriter in '91, we got docked if we didn’t double space.
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.
LUXURY!BACKINMYDAYWEDIDNTHAVESPACES.DONTGETMESTARTEDONTHISLOWERCASENONSENSE
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…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.
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.
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.
