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