feeling sorry for my future studes

[kutsuwamushi]

I know I shouldn't, but I still get irritated when people use "popular" to describe things that are common but don't involve a preference or choice, e.g. "it's popular for languages to conjugate for person and number."

It seems that they're still mostly not using it for negative things - so it's still not synonymous with "common." But it's also not my meaning of popular, either.

I think I'm starting to understand what it feels like to be an old fogey afraid of language change. Help, the world is leaving me behind! I'm mortal and will die.

Comments

[dorothy1901]

I feel for you. I handle my discomfort with the difference between the original meaning of "decimate" versus the current meaning of "decimate" by mostly avoiding the word.

[kutsuwamushi]

That one doesn't bother me at all, because the "devastate" definition has been around for centuries - for the majority of the time that the word has existed in English, in fact. IIt was used to mean "reduce by one tenth" around the same time that nice was an insult meaning "foolish" or "fussy."

The idea that it only meant "reduce by one tenth" until recently is actually kind of a reconstruction; you hear the first complaints about more general definition after the civil war, at least several decades late. And students these days have to be taught that the more general definition is "wrong."

For me the "devastate" meaning is still pretty natural; that kind of training never really internalized, at least not for that word... so, I don't feel like he language is being changed out from under me.