"Vocabulary Shift" Topic

Words change meanings. Anyone who reads a bit knows that. "Impersonate" no longer means "personify" and "captivated" is not what we now say when someone's being held for ransom.

But I'm watching one change right now. When did "realistic" come to mean "shabby or poorly-maintained" in relation to fictional vehicles and buildings, "lacking a moral compass" when applied to people, and "utterly cynical" when applied to narration?

And what does this say about us, and the world we live in?

On the one hand, language naturally evolves. For example, the word "fact" was originally an adjective, but became a noun. Further, "fact" can now be an unsupported assertion, or a "true fact." Personally, I hate this last development as I see it as a bastardization of the language, but aside from trying to use this and any other word as appropriately as possible, there's not much I can do to defeat the trend.

However, I agree with Brother piepenbrink that language is definitely changing for the worse as words lose their original meanings. Intellectual laziness plus outright ignorance due to the public school system's (evidently deliberate) efforts to dumb down further each new generation.

In an age when people can choose their own color, gender, etc, changing words to fit their agenda would seem a natural extension of the program.

Curmudgeonly,

TVAG

Yep, the trend is utter garbage. Precise language improves communications across many barriers. Imprecise leads to misunderstanding, which leads to mistrust, and so on down the line.

I don't dispute the effects of imprecise language--or of deliberate blurring to obscure meaning, but I think what we've got here is a cultural shift, which is more distressing in this instance. The scruffy-looking SF terrain is more "realistic" than the clean, well-maintained stuff because it looks more like the world the person so describing it sees outside his home. When did this happen?

But let me toss out another word shift I just picked up in Samuel Delaney's Starboard Wine. In Sam Johnson's day, "to have a good literature" was to have read a lot, and remembered. In Austen's or Dicken's time it was a verb or occupation. They "did literature." Only in late Victorian times did the word describe what was written--and 1892 is the earliest known use of "hack" to describe someone whose work wasn't really literature.

This is why I don't take too seriously that NEA poll which asks Americans whether they've read a work of literature in the last month or the last year. They're not really measuring the decline in the reading of fiction, but the shift in meaning. Every year, more Americans think "literature" means the stuff they were assigned in school, and not the Tom Clancy or Danielle Steele they finished last night.

"You lost the cognitive footing to use the word 'realism' somewhere between 'undead robots' and '40,000 years in the future'." – SWMBO

I would say scruffy and dirty was good for "realistic" modern naval vessels if I had never served aboard a JMSDF vessel. There are probably others that are as fastidiously tidy. As far as a fictional milieu goes, many scifi settings are extremely clean – often a key part of their ambience. That's why I prefer "doctrinal" for fictional settings.

Two years from now "literature" will mean contains vowels and punctuation.

Since I brought up punctuation, I have a new one, I believe: "I'm sorry. I love you." or "I'm sorry I love you"?

As far as increasing ambiguity is concerned, it's interesting that the trend correlates with the rise of social media, which is diluted and destroyed by ambiguity and enhanced by structure.

eto, I'd have said social media thrives on ambiguity: the piranha suggest something untrue and possibly even libelous, then when they're called on it they can claim that wasn't what they meant at all. Ambiguity functions much like the addition of new and misleading definitions to trendy dictionaries.

But the overall resemblance of social media is to T.H. White's ants, who have for adjectives and adverbs only two words--"ripe" for things they approve of, and "unripe" for things they don't. Watch someone throwing an Internet hissy fit and describing an opponent with half a dozen words mostly completely irrelevant to the discussion, except that they all mean "unripe."

I remember a comment on a particular German author that he contributed a lot to getting the language straightened out and suitable for discussions after the distortions of the Hitler years. I would guess there are young people writing already who will be part of the eventual clean-up of English--but they'll be doing it in old age.

There is also the tendency to use many words when only one is needed…

Don't – Stop.

Racist now means I don't like you, you hurt my feelings, or stop speaking the truth.

Wolfhag

"Let's eat, Grandma."

"Let's eat Grandma."

Punctuation saves lives.

TVAG

Forgive me gentlemen, but as a Brit, seeing a bunch of Americans bemoaning the state of the English language is a right laugh!

Carry on chaps…

I'd have said social media thrives on ambiguity:

What you describe is not unique to social media. People get pissed at me when I use their favourite politician's last speech in the propaganda section of my information warfare training. They never complain when I use something from the other side, though …

Social media, however, relies on linking related things together. When you can link anything to anything else, it dilutes the capability.

How about: ‘Axing a question'?

Well, there are certainly questions which should be axed. My nomination would be "'tsall minis, init?"

Just over yonder

Ask versus ax: link

Wolfhag

Oh, that sort of thing comes and goes regularly, Wolfhag. Hence Grimm's Law, and many others. But meaning often shifts for a reason. Hence my concern with the new meaning of "realistic." For that to have happened, the world has to have changed for quite a few people.

There are no stupid questions. But there are a lot of stupid people who ask them.

BTW, I haven't seen the proliferation of "realistic = dirty looking". I am a fan of figures that look like they have seen the battlefield. I just did a 15mm Katusha as a gift for a colleague. Her family commented on my skill at making it look like a field vehicle and not a motorpool queen. That said, nobody was claiming that was a "realistic" look.

Beat up cars are realistic for a junkyard.

Shiny clean cars are realistic for goin' to the movies to see and be seen.

True enough, eto.

Probably not much hope of relocating the thread which got me to brooding at this point. It was, as I recall, something about SF interiors, and I remember thinking that I wasn't much interested in docking at a rusted, poorly-maintained spaceport, and didn't think one would last very long. But I'd been seeing "realistic" applied to high-level politicians with no integrity and to the most cynical of narratives long before that.

Hey, those cars are shiny and clean even UNDERNEATH !!

Nothing but a cleaned and polished undercarriage for the Drive-In movies! I mean, they're showing Nowferatu and zeds are attacking the flick. Tres chic.

I've docked at a lot of … less than immaculate ..? naval facilities. I've seen a number of the types of problem one would expect. I am sure I will always believe that going to sea (and space) is an inherently dangerous undertaking, but the Japanese disabused me of the notion is is a necessarily grubby one.

Americans using "Z" instead of s in words.
jon

Ciaphas, (or Clapham if you use autocorrect)
Shermans inability to spell is down to Webster having a sulk in the 1820s.

Let me "axe yo sumthin", does the fact that some so-called educated people insist on pronouncing words like "especially" and "etcetera" with an "x" annoy you as well?

Sorry, needed to get my "pet peeve" out for a walkies.