Love It or Hate It? Changing Language

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...

Automagic Story Fix: Would I, Could I?

On the blog this week we're talking about:

Free ReDo: If you could automagically change anything in any of your books, would you?

~slaps knee~ Oh, dear reader, yes, I would.  I--like many of my peers--would change all the dagnabit typos, misspelled words, MIA punctuation, etc. that snuck through eight passes of edits.

Is there plot or character dev stuff I'd change? Yeeeah. Probably. In LARCOUT there were some scenes I'd cut that I shouldn't have, scenes that revealed clues to the Whodunnit part of the story. I was rightfully called out by reviewers for dorking up the mystery thread, so if I could wave a wand and fix that, I would. Then again, the beauty of being Indie is that I could make those changes and release a "new and improved" edition. Might happen. Maybe. First I have to wrap up my UF series.

~Wanders off to ponder changes~