I love the renaissance of language, the minting of new words and concepts, the remixing of our heritage words with new Unicode characters and the mashing of new syntax.
I see it as progress - which destroys meanings as much as liberating new meanings. A word becomes a poetic palimpsest of needlessly complex layers.
I am an engineer-type, I like concrete words with focused meanings, I failed English at school while excelling at the hard sciences. The loss of meaning disturbs me, but I value the gains, and I accept that new language requires freedom from old dictators.
There's definitely a mix of good and bad as language changes.
Losing the word "meme" to the colloquial definition is a loss and a massive disappointment to me, because I think the gene analogy is insightful. When I talk to people about memes-as-in-memetics they're bound to get confused or even disbelieve me that it had any other meaning.
I've been accused of man-splaining in situations where I am legitimately being helpful, am an authority on the subject, and have good intentions, so I kinda don't like that words contribution, personally.
Literally should mean literally, and only literally, because it's useless if it doesn't.
On the other hand, there were all sorts of weird and redundant words that existed in English that probably shouldn't. This probably isn't true, but the word "praxis" seems like it exists because someone important misspoke when trying to say "practice" and then insisted it was a word in itself.
My impression is that the effect the parent talks about is real, though. There is a lot of regression happening in the language even as people get more literate, and the echo chamber of the internet reinforces trends into more lasting changes.
My biggest gripe of all with anyone effecting change on language lies with the marketing-focused actors who think they're doing their job well when they:
1) Appropriate colloquialisms and push them into the mainstream where they have more staying power than they otherwise would.
2) Refuse to expose people to words they're not familiar with because it might not appeal to them. Ever consider some people might want to learn new words? That starts with exposure. Lowest common denominator advertising is a well-funded stupefying force.
3) Create new words and change meanings to suit their narrative/sales pitch. A recent example is an article CNN ran about a new alternative to vapes and cigarettes. What they described is actually just a different kind of vaporizer. It emits nicotine vapor. They're calling it something different to avoid the stigma that shallow media coverage of vaping created, and making the word more ambiguous and less useful as a result.
> Losing the word "meme" to the colloquial definition is a loss and a massive disappointment to me
I love "The Selfish Gene", but it make me happy that memes and virality are modern metaphors for chunks of thought transmitted by wet symbolic processors. I believe that children now bellyfeel the meanings which is fantastic, even if they don't know the exact sense.
> Literally should mean literally, and only literally
I think I used to agree, but now I just like to amuse myself (and sometimes others) by misusing it. I do the same with many other words (sophisticated, nice, proud, etc). I like the layers of meaning, and I love multiple connections, although I still don't like most poetry.
> 3) Create new words and change meanings to suit their narrative/sales pitch
This is a true evil: the defiling of words for commercial gain riles me.
The selfish gene is a great book. I read it when it was about 15 and it really resonated with me.
Except the last chapter about f$%#ing memes. Hated it. It was like taking the core idea of the book and providing a cumbersome over-extended metaphor about ideas. So the colloquial meme is just as bad because it constantly reminds me of the original shit-house idea.
Climbing Mount Improbable was good, but I can't rate Dawkins' later work. The Extended Phenotype I found impenetrable, and I've tried reading it a few times. The God stuff ... omg, just please stop shouting about your Daddy issues.
I blame modern business marketing practices on the erosion of meaning in language. Words are so overloaded and defined in ways to confuse consumers and skirt legalities that it makes many terms devoid of any useful meaning.
Er, the Romans spoke Latin, as well as read it and wrote it. It was their vulgar language (from "vulgus", Latin for "common people"). The first Latin Bible was called The Vulgate because it was written in then common tongue of Latin instead of Greek or Hebrew. Latin was the language of commerce and conquest for the Roman Empire, as English was for the British Empire. Lastly, every language is invented, no?
I see it as progress - which destroys meanings as much as liberating new meanings. A word becomes a poetic palimpsest of needlessly complex layers.
I am an engineer-type, I like concrete words with focused meanings, I failed English at school while excelling at the hard sciences. The loss of meaning disturbs me, but I value the gains, and I accept that new language requires freedom from old dictators.