“begging the question”. it’s not the same as “bringing up a question”, it means assuming your conclusion is true in the course of an argument

To be fair, that original meaning is illogical (as in, the meaning doesn’t follow from the literal words used), so it’s not surprising that people misused it to have a more logical meaning.

(wiki says) it comes from Greek to Latin to English in the 16th century, so I’m sure it suffers a bit in modern transfusion.

This is one of those ones that’s different whether you’re in British English or American English.

The technical philosophical usage seems to mostly be on the British side of things.

Loose and lose might as well be the same word these days. Drives me up a damn wall.

That and “POV” doesn’t mean what it used to mean anymore. Also drives me up a wall.

What…what does POV mean now??

POV: I am confused

wait what is that supposed to mean? (i’m not a native english speaker, might be why i don’t get it)

“Demonstrating my point of view: I am confused”

thanks

I’m still confused? It’s not Point of View, it’s Confused Point of View?

huh? i don’t think some_kind_of_guy is saying ‘POV’ means “I am confused” (is that how you understood the comment above?)

They gave that as an example. POV just seems to be used an an unnecessary prefix to stating an opinion.

A bit like to “useless ‘nobody:’” line before a meme caption.

Just demonstrating an incorrect use of POV 😅

Is it not “point of view”?

Yeah but it used to mean “piss over vulvas”. Pornhub changed the meaning to “point of view” and everyone just went with it.

Yeah, I remember an exchange I had, where someone asked what POV means I answered with Point of View and some spoiled Z started laughing, saying I outed myself, but as table top gamer… that was always the abbreviation we used.

And what does it mean for those people?

“Piss over vulvas”? Not sure if that’s real.

I assume that kid thought it was only for porn. Ironically, they are the ones who outed themselves, though who gives a shit? Everyone watches porn.

POV has meant point of view for far longer than porn has used it. I have no idea of the origins, but it’s old. I remember using it in English classes to describe how stories were written, for example, and I’m pretty sure it wasn’t a modern thing.

Correct, correct. I don’t really have good memories of that place due to some other reasons.

As table top gamer, POV always meant point of view… what’s a modern meaning of it?

Breathe and breath too…

“Drives me up the wall” becoming “drives me up a wall”.

Hey, maybe they have a specific wall up which they are driven!

This drives me up that wall

“Decimating” no longer means killing ten percent as the Romans did; now it is used to mean the killing of a majority, so it’s close to the opposite of its original meaning.

I thought decimating meant reducing to a tenth, as in removing 90%?

No. It meant killing every tenth soldier in a line

The meaning is derived from the brutality of the act, not the proportion of people killed.

The “deci” prefix is just a coincidence then?

More like a vague gesture, which, in idiom chock-full of metonymy, is legitimate.

You’re being downvoted, but I suspect you’re actually correct. A note about the act of decimation: it wasn’t just killing every tenth soldier. It was that the other nine soldiers were forced to kill the tenth. It was an absolutely brutal act where soldiers were forced to kill their friends and comrades.

It makes sense that saying an act is as brutal as decimation would then come to replace the word itself over time. That happens pretty frequently in language evolution.

People really love to feel smug about others using words “wrong” for some reason. Let them. I don’t care.

Presently used to mean “soon” or “in a bit” but now means “happening right now”

The meaning of bemused is similar to “befuddled”, but it’s more often used as if it means “amused”

It used to be a firm rule that you mustn’t end a sentence in a proposition.

“This is the sort of bloody nonsense up with which I will not put.” - attributed to Churchill

The preposition one is what I came to say.

Literally is still understood, it just gets misused.

Going in a bit of a different direction, emojis and things like /s are well understood now, which is an addition.

I wonder if some day in the future emojis will make their way from casual conversation into business? I guess I already use things like 👍 in semi formal work chats - it’s especially useful as a way of ensuring a message isn’t read sarcastically or passive aggressively. LLMs seem more than happy to plop an emoji or two into a document.

Speaking of AI I’m already noticing that poor spelling, slang and the like are almost signifiers of a human. I wonder if ways of talking that distinguish us from AI will become more common or more valuable?

In my country, a lot of my peers (me too) use stickers (the cute ones) in in-company-chats usually with people we know like colleagues and managers

So I assume emojis are also done?

Actually, when I think about it. I rarely see people complaining about emojis at work. Ironically if there’s one place that people hate emojis it’s Reddit or Lemmy 😅.

Do you speak another language than English? I’d be fascinated to know if similar language battles are happening in other languages.

Yes! Well, I am from India, so… I speak multiple languages with people who are comfortable in their own and yes, there is a lot of language battles in India too, especially Search up Hindi Imposition if you’re interested.

I still feel like that one is a flavour-of-the-month adjustment - “literally” as an intensifier is already being replaced by “lowkey”, “deadass” etc..

If so, that’s great. Literally was taken; sometimes you’re trying to communicate something that sounds figurative, or like hyperbole, but it’s not.

It’s funny, quite a few misguided souls on the threadiverse seem to think that the /s is implied.

On the internet, it never is. That’s why we invented it.

I suppose the word “boomer” has changed meaning very quickly. It rarely gets used anymore to refer to actual boomers (people born just after WW2) and instead now can refer either vaguely to anyone older than 30, or anyone with an antiquated/problematic notion of social norms.

Also an electroboom fan :p

I miss double spaces after periods.

We…don’t do this anymore? I can’t even recall what I’ve been doing for this for the last 20 years.

Autocorrect on Microsoft products turns double-space into single space by default. Gotta turn that shit of every time, it’s very frustrating.

It annoys me when people put double spaces after periods, but i guess it was necessary in the typrewiter days? Idk

Don’t do that unless it’s a monotype font, please.

Sincerely, typesetters everywhere.

Why not? I want to have more white space between my sentences than I do between words in the same sentence. I’m writing emails, business crap, and Lemmy posts; nothing that’s going to see any love from a typesetter. Is there some more appropriate way to get what I want than hitting the spacebar twice between sentences?

Well it’s okay to break rules, right? So long as you understand how and why.

Your version of readability skews from the norm established over centuries. Fine! Just don’t expect the rules to bend to you.

Readability for author and reader vary. Whose reading comprehension is more important? Your call.

In some cases, it might be appropriate to break paragraph convention and isolate important sentences.

Our browser is going to fingerprint us through this habit and we’re going to get served knee replacement ads because of it.

LUXURY!BACKINMYDAYWEDIDNTHAVESPACES.DONTGETMESTARTEDONTHISLOWERCASENONSENSE

We were taught single space in the mid 90s, so that can’t be too recent.

I was taught two spaces in the 90s and didn’t find out it’s changed until maybe a couple years ago.

It hasn’t changed, you were just taught an overly specific application and not taught that it was such.

I learned on a typewriter in '91, we got docked if we didn’t double space.

In pre-secondary education I was taught to double-space, but post I was told to single IIRC. I prefer single personally.

Interestingly, typing two spaces on my phone is replaced by a period and a single space. It’s like a vestigial mechanic from that practice. It’s aware of the context of what a double space was used for, but it serves a totally different purpose to not have to type a period.

Print publishing has 500 years of convention built on trial and error.

As a person who learned to type on a typewriter, and then became a typesetter and publisher, and now does a lot of editing, double spaces are only of use in a monospace type face where there is no kerning possible.

Otherwise, type with variable spaces between the letters plus variable letter sizes is physically harder to read when there are extra gaps between the sentences, despite the way you were trained (by boomers, probably) to type.

We were always supposed to put punctuation inside quotation marks; however, now it seems to be the user’s choice of inside or outside. And I have to admit that most of the time when I’m using quotes, it seems more logical to me to place the punctuation outside of them.

Yeah, I still feel like I’m supposed to, but frequently I think it makes more sense to pull it outside if it isn’t part of the quote. Putting it in the quotation makes it seem like it’s associated with the quotation, when it may not be.

For me, i make peace with this by thinking, the rules are one way for writing dialog, and perhaps another way when needing to convey the exactness of a quote.

YES! That’s basically my same reasoning.

You know, I actually prefer that it be variable, but only when it serves a purpose.

Like, if Im quoting someone “I might want to indicate that they completed a sentence.”, but also continue beyond it.

We were always supposed to put punctuation inside quotation marks;

Isn’t this a US English thing? In India we were taught to close them like brackets - i.e., the one that opened last closes first. So

‘Don’t wait. I will come later.’

But

He said ‘I will come later’.

also i fear that “comfort” is losing the battle to “comfortability”

That makes me very uncomfortabilityable

I’ve never heard this one. I guess I’m getting old.

said often in an office context, not a youth thing in my experience

People using then instead of than. I never saw that 30 years ago.

Plenty of bad grammar and speling to go around.

30 years ago fewer people with literacy problems were publicly and obsessively defacing literary norms.

their/they’re/there ;_;

would of literally their

Literally Literally

From my perspective, literally being used for emphasis does not actually change its meaning, it’s simply hyperbole.

If you complain that you’ve been “waiting for hours”, even though it’s been 45 minutes, that doesn’t change the meaning of “hours”, you’re just exaggerating.

Hyperbole is a stylistic element; style is a completely different level of language than grammar/spelling/semantics (word meanings). As another example of style, ending a sentence with a preposition is grammatically correct but stylistically not recommended.

“I’ve told you a million times, don’t exaggerate”

I agree, but there was a period in the '00s, or maybe early '10s, where the meaning was changing because you only ever saw it mean “figuratively”, to the point where dictionaries included both meanings. I think it’s settled back to its original meaning now though.

The OED actually includes the definition of literally as being what used to be the opposite of its definition nowadays, so I think that it does count as an auto-antonym (a word that means both itself, and the opposite of itself)

“Casted”

The past-tense of cast is cast. “The fisherman cast their line into the river.” “The actor was cast in the leading role.”

Casted makes you sound like a child.

I think any word sounds more childish with ed on the end! “I wented fishinged at the beached and casteded”

While not totally gone, German’s genitive case (which is used to show ownership) is becoming less and less common. They have both the genetive case as well as their equivalent of " 's " - which is just “s,” if you’re wondering. Example:

Der Herr der Ringe.

The Lord of the Rings. It would normally be “die Ringe,” but it becomes “der” in the genetive case.

Another transition in German is that the “formal you” is being used less and less frequently. I understand this is the case for a few other European languages as well.

Interesting! Thanks for a non english perspective. Is German language development Influenced by widespread english competency? Are Germans becoming less fussy about certain rules in favour of some of English’s simpler or more flexible constructs? (Not to suggest that English isn’t a Byzantine mess of a language itself!)

Unfortunately, I’m not a native German speaker. So, take this with a grain of salt.

I will say that the German language has always been open to loan words from other languages. And, according to my German teacher (who is native), the biggest change recently in that regard is NOT how loan words are accepted BUT how quickly they are accepted these days. New loan words are being added all the time, especially by young people. He said that generally the word will be accepted as it is at first, and then over time it well become more “germanified” and used more like native words. He said this process used to take decades but now it can happen in less than a year. An example of a germanified English loan word is “chatten” which means “to chat,” just like English. Ich chatte, du chattest, wir chatten. (I chat, you chat, we chat.)

I believe the simplification of grammatical structures (like the abandonment of genetive) has been going on slowly over centuries and is mostly unrelated to contact with English speakers. But, there is likely some influence there.

Really interesting stuff! It just goes to show that even without ‘authorities’ such as the French Language Academy, loan words end up becoming modified and molded by their adoptive language. I’m learning Japanese and it has so many loan words going all the way back to the dutch. Some are barely recognisable for example computer is パソコン = pasokon = personal computer.

Australian English language is now largely Americanised, a process that started in the post-war era is now mostly complete.

• Terms such as ‘gaol’ have been widely replaced by ‘jail’.
• ‘Programme’ is mostly replaced by ‘program’.
• A ‘car bonnet’ is likely to be called a ‘hood’.
• ‘Play lunch’ is mostly replaced with ‘recess’.
• ‘Pusher’ is mostly called a ‘pram’
• ‘Lacker band’ is now mostly just ‘rubber band’.
• ‘Boomer’ no longer means kangaroo, but instead ‘Old person.’

I’m not really bothered by it or anything, but it’s been interesting to see it shift even over my lifetime.

Americans don’t use pram though, we say stroller

Yeah, pram is a British term. Or pushchair.

Bonnet

Australian

Uwotm8

Elden Ring is trying to bring the spelling back to “gaol.”

I’d say pram is still pretty British ("I have to push the pram-a-lot!") in the US it would be almost definitely stroller.

‘Programme’ is mostly replaced by ‘program’.

We can still pronounce it correctly (with an O like ‘pronounce’ or ‘proclaim’) so there’s that

Far as I’ve ever seen, that’s how everyone pronounces it.

I don’t understand the pusher/pram one at all.

Yes, but we got the good aussie slang!

Like, “no worries”. Fucking love it.

Y’all still got dual carriageways over there?

Is that an Australian-ism? I don’t remember it ever coming up in conversation with my American or British friends.

Yeah it’s a divided highway. I got directions once that included what I heard as a “jewel carriageway” and had just a very confusing time getting that clarified.

i’ve never learnt to use tildes in spanish lol i mean i know some rules for that but i just never cared, most people dont use them while texting unless the corrector adds it.

Pronouns getting weird, especially when and is added, like “for him and I” or “her and I’s house”.

Also excetera for etcetera and mischievious for mischievous

I get irrationally angry any time I hear “I’s”. I can tolerate most other grammar issues, but something about that particular butchery of English drives me up the wall.

It’s just indolence.

It’s like people who put an S on the end of ‘e-mail’ to pluralize it.

Would you rather prefer i’s or mine’s?

I don’t know if this fits the question, but in Brazil the “Portuguese-Language Orthographic Agreement of 1990” only started to take effect in 2009 (after I was born), in a transition state, and in 2015 it became official and obligatory.

The changes that I still fumble with are diacritics (e.g. “Idéia” -> “Ideia”) and hyphens (e.g. “contra-regra” -> “contrarregra”).

Most definitely fits the question, also TIL about the PLOA. Are Brazilian and continental Portuguese different enough to be called dialects? Given its much larger population does Brazil have an outsized influence on Portuguese language development through media?

does Brazil have an outsized influence on Portuguese language development through media?

I don’t know since I only interact with other Brazilians, though from what I can remember of early to mid 2010s internet, European Portuguese was preferred over Brazilian Portuguese (as in, when a website or app had a PT translation it’d wouldn’t be PT-BR).
Nowadays, I believe both are commonly available.

Are Brazilian and continental Portuguese different enough to be called dialects?

The most common way to refer to Brazilian Portuguese that I’ve seen is that it’s a variant of European Portuguese, I’m not a linguist so I don’t know the difference between a variant and a dialect.

Interesting, thanks for taking the time to reply! How do European Portuguese sound to the Brazilian ear? Like, as an Australian, New Zealanders sound sort of plucky and goofy to me, Americans are brash and loud, Canadians are laid-back, received English sounds polite or formal etc. I’m sure they all think Australians sound like sandpaper 😅

I’m bad at describing it, so hear it for yourself!

Literally and Crescendo are my vocabulary pet peeves. Both have stupidly evolved to include definitions that mean the exact opposite of their true meanings.

Literally is annoying, but Crescendo is impossible. That is a specific musical term with an unalterable meaning. It means a gradual increase in volume, but it has come to mean a climax. Something will be described as “it rose to a crescendo,” and that is simply wrong. Something can crescendo to a climax, but not the other way around. If you change it to mean the climax, you can’t crescendo to a crescendo, s what’s the word for gradually increasing the volume?

Besides, it’s a musical term, and musicians will define musical terms, not illiterate civilians.

And if Literally can also mean “similar to,” then what word can be used to literally mean Literally?

That’s it, I’m going to start using “It rose to a fortissississimo”!

And don’t get me started on how the Pianoforte is just called the piano now, leaving out half of its loudness range smh.

Literallyly

In US usage, it used to be that a situation could be “fraught with” complications, or hidden meaning, or difficulty, but it had to be “fraught with” something.

These days, the British style of saying that the situation is simply “fraught” seems to be way more popular than before.

Efficiency at work i guess. Maybe some cunning linguist can explain.

“Reticent” used to mean ‘reluctance to speak’, or, ‘holding your tongue’, but in the last decade I saw it being used more frequently as a straight up synonym for ‘reluctance’. I wonder if people maybe think it’s a more authoritative sounding word?

It’s not a change of convenience or cultural drift, just a sign of people reading less and subconsciously trying to hide it, I think.

Apple put the nail in the coffin for adverbs when “Think different” let illiterates think they were speaking correctly.

*speaking correct

.

I’m so sorry; I couldn’t help myself

I was one of the first years to have the new spelling rules.
It used to be, that a letter appearing more than twice in direct sequence would be cut to just twice. But that was lifted and is now just how many it should normally be. Examples: Schifffahrt, Brennnessel, Seeelefant.

It used to be, that “dass” could also be spelt “daß”, but the rules for “ss” and “ß” were made clearer and more concise.

They also changed the way words could be split at the end of a line. If there was a double consonant in-between the syllables that were to split, the first syllable would take both consonants but now they are split evenly.
immer is split im-mer and not imm-er
But ck makes an exception: knackig is kna-ckig instead of old knak-kig

The one that bothers me most (heard a lot in the software dev world) is when people say process-eez instead of processes, even if it is technically a word now, like ain’t

Pour one out for the Oxford Comma .

Let’s eat Grandma

Commas save lives!

The rich couple, me and ScarJo donated ten thousand dollars to a local charity school.

Y’all make a cute couple but she’s doing the heavy lifting.

That’s typical of her relationships.

Us that technically a missing Oxford comma, or just a missing comma?

The grandma quote is a missing comma in general, but there’s another reply with a missing Oxford Comma.

Although punctuation is waning, I’m willing to spend the time to use it.

From my cold dead hands!!

Ain’t ain’t a word.

It is now.

Not exactly what you’re asking, but double spaces after ends of sentences.

I still use them. I find it makes reading and finding sentences easier in a paragraph. There was a study that it had an impact

Ending sentences with propositions, and getting them jumbled around. My work does it in their advertisements and i cry every time.

“See what classes you can register for.” Or modifying it to be worse; “see what classes you can register for fast”

propositions

Hey sexy mama, wanna kill all humans?

LOL I’m gonna leave it that way 🤣

Unique coming to just mean unusual.

People no longer double-space after sentences.  No one cares that further compares metaphorical distance and farther compares physical distance.  Most people seem to think that joining two independent clauses with a comma (a comma splice) is just fine.  Things are now done on accident instead of by accident.  Compute used to be something you did; now, it’s something you rent.  People seem to have given up on less being used for uncountable things and fewer for countable things.  Now they just use less for everything.  People these days are enamored ‘by’ something instead of with it (or of it, for our British friends).