Saturday 7 January 2012

A Little Bit more on Use and Misuse

We all know that languages evolve by two-way trafficking of words which are borrowed, stolen, forced on people and invented. Meanings and contexts alter over time, but none of us has to agree with any of them and we are all free to adopt a little bit of anarchy as part of our linguistic ownership.

Thus do dialects, amalgams (like pidgin) and secret languages (such as Cockney rhyming slang) develop, adding to the richness of the brew.

As I posted earlier, I am now leaving “pop” alone but will concentrate on other words that fall short of my usage standards.  Two contenders – which have become less frequent recently, at odds with how these things usually work (think of synchonicity and the Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon) – are “decimate” and “fayre”.

Named examples will follow as I notice them.

To balance my linguistic intolerances – which is a personal thing, which is the point of blogging, really, since these pages will not be assessed, critiqued or marked in any way – I am showing flexibility and radical thinking by introducing words of my own. 

Example to follow.

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