#semantic change

[oddwomen]

The Carroll Herald (August 24, 1897)

[defectivegembrain]

People are like "I can't use this word in this new scary way I don't have permission from the dictionary" and the dictionary is like "I'm literally just recording what you do and I'm constantly out of date because of your infinite creativity"

[whatkindofsoupp]

of course I got the purple category first on the connections today. I’m a colloquialcore slangpilled suffixmaxxer participating in grammargate and semantic-change mania

[bbrs-68]

Frieren Season Two is coming out this Friday! I love this series so much, and could not be more excited! And to help whet my appetite, I'm going to be posting little details I find interesting/funny about the show all week leading up to Friday. So, to start us off...

If you're watch Frieren in the original Japanese, you might just notice that a couple of the words are still in English. Namely "dungeon" and "party". For example, when Frieren says "I'm the mage of the PARTY that conquered the most DUNGEONS in history.

What's funny about that, to me at least, is that it means that these words are being used exclusively in their fantasy/RPG sense, and completely divorced from their original meaning. So "party" does not mean "a gathering of people," it JUST means "a team of adventurers." Similarly, dungeon doesn't mean "a structure for holding prisoners," it's just "that place that adventurers go into to fight monsters and find treasure."

And that just makes the part of my brain that cares about how words evolve and change happy.

Some in-depth analysis

[littlemizzlinguistics]

French speakers need to chill out about how English speakers use French loanwords lmao. Like yes, I will use “vis a vis” to mean “regarding/concerning” because it’s a legitimate use of the phrase in English and that’s how semantic change works, babbbyyyyyy!

If the French don’t like it, they shouldn’t have done the Norman invasion 🤷🏼‍♀️

[linguisticalities]

Researchers fed 7.9 million speeches into AI—and what they found upends our understanding of language

A massive linguistic study challenges the belief that language change is driven by young people alone. Researchers found that older adults often adopt new word meanings within a few years—and sometimes even lead the change themselves.

[yvanspijk]

The meanings of words constantly change. This is called semantic drift. Sometimes, a meaning radically changes over time. For example, a girl used to be a child of any gender, a hussy used to be a housewife, and a knight used to be a boy. Here are four types of semantic drift.

[sharkchunks]

The Paradine Case (1947, Alfred Hitchcock)

Semantic change rocks! Dialogue from Scene at 1:48:25, images above slightly skewed from a moment later in the scene.