maneth985 reblogged your post:always a little torn between “language evolves and...
Okay maybe I’m having some reading comprehension issues here but what do you mean by that?
basically like. there are certain terms (I’m thinking right now about “crack ship” but there are definitely ones that are more serious) that shift meaning over time due to usage changes, and from a descriptive viewpoint that means that the meaning changes as the usage does. i.e. the usage supersedes the meaning.
but there’s also...at a certain point with that meaning slippage comes a loss of meaning and often a coincident dilution of specificity. I’ve talked before about my frustration over this with “problematic.” It had a meaning once upon a time, and a useful one, which was the one I originally learned in an academic context - meaning basically “thorny, knotty, difficult, requires unpacking.” The current usage of it to refer to “thing that is bad” has become so broad and vague that it is, imo, effectively meaningless.
I’ve seen this come up with “mansplaining” as well, where people talk about it being used well outside the original parameters (for instance, a long conversation in which someone was arguing that a woman can mansplain, which I would argue is a usage that fundamentally dilutes the meaning of a useful word that was coined to talk about a specific interaction with a specific, gendered, power dynamic.
