I’m not a professional linguist, but it does seem to me that language tends to get more casual, sloppy, and imprecise over time, that words that once had a very specific meaning often become more generalized and widely applied to things that are similar but not actually the same.
On one level that’s probably fine – it’s just naturally what happens when millions of people in different contexts use words and phrases billions of times. But the downside is that without some modicum of precision we can’t communicate well and are more easily misunderstood; people often think we mean something we actually don’t.
Most of the time that don’t signify, but sometimes it does.
I’ll illustrate with three terms that I’ve been thinking a lot about lately, for different reasons: consciousness, socialism, and antisemitism – the first two in this post and the third in the next.
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