Our topic at the SFF Seven this week is our favorite and least favorite ways the language is changing.
I'm not much of a cane-shaker about language. I'm kind of a language nerd, endlessly fascinated by etymology, and in another life-path I would totally have been a linguist and polyglot.
(Though I only know English and French, along with a smattering of other languages. Still, in my mind, I imagine myself learning new languages, when I *cough* have time.)
I love how language evolves, how it's a fluid and living thing. (Except for those dead languages, forever frozen in a particular form to ossify that way. It always seems kind of sad to me.) I even love how technology is changing our use of language - like how "tho" has a different connotation from "though," even though the former is technically a shortening of the latter. I'm enough of a word nerd that I have a full set of the (paper) Oxford English Dictionary and reference books on the Roots of English and a Sanskrit bible (whence we derived many of said roots).
I do have my peeves. It annoys me that "factoid" has totally lost its original meaning of a sexy but deliberately untrue tidbit to, well, exactly the thing it was meant to comment on satirically. But I try to let it go because clearly people wanted a word to mean a "short fact" and glommed onto that.
Otherwise, I try to keep up with language shifts. They're a reflection of a dynamic society, and learning new words keeps my brain limber.
I'm sure learning a new language would, too...
Sunday, June 14, 2020
Love It or Hate It? Changing Language
Labels:
Changes,
evolution,
factoid,
Jeffe Kennedy,
language
Jeffe Kennedy is a multi-award-winning and best-selling author of romantic fantasy. She is the current President of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA) and is a member of Novelists, Inc. (NINC). She is best known for her RITA® Award-winning novel, The Pages of the Mind, the recent trilogy, The Forgotten Empires, and the wildly popular, Dark Wizard. Jeffe lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She is represented by Sarah Younger of Nancy Yost Literary Agency.