From Phil Runkel in reply to Bill P's of 20 March:
Yes, I too bewail the loss of distinctions and fine turns of
meaning. People come across a word to which specialists have gievn
special meaning and use it in the way that the context and their previous
experience with the word suggests to them without further investigation.
So the word loses its technical meaning, and a new way has to be invented
if that technical meaning is to be preserved. And, if enough people
want to preserve the technical meaning, that is what happens. Then you
and I say, "That's just what X meant twenty years ago!"
From Phil Runkel in reply to Bill P's of 20 March:
Yes, I too bewail the loss of distinctions and fine turns of
meaning. People come across a word to which specialists have gievn
special meaning and use it in the way that the context and their previous
experience with the word suggests to them --
That happens, too, but what seems worse to me is the way people sometimes
use words without apparently even listening to what they're saying (the
nice recent example being "I could care less"). Try this: ask somebody how
much he or she paid for something, and then say, in an admiring tone, "Gee,
that would have been cheap at _half_ the price."
Try this: ask somebody how
much he or she paid for something, and then say, in an admiring tone, "Gee,
that would have been cheap at _half_ the price."
Almost like a double negative, which except for the puritanical can be
cumulative emphasis or logical construct, and the logic takes a moment to
sort out. Something like Bilbo Baggins's comment at his eleventy-eleventh
birthday party: "I don't know half of you half as well as I should like;
and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve." Now there's
a real shuffling of the deck of plusses and minuses!
From Phil Runkel in reply to Bill P's of 27 March:
Thanks for your nice examples. Every now and then I read something or
hear something on the TV produced by members of some organization. And I
wonder whether the people who reviewed that utterance were awake when they
did it. Or I wonder whether that organization hasn't told its employees
to have their utteranced reviewed before exposing them to the public. Our
Safeway chain of grocery stores here posts its slogan in large letters:
Nobody Does it Better for Less.