Language is always changing. At one point ‘an apron’ was ‘a napron’ while words like ‘literally’ are no longer literally literal. What are some language battles that have been lost in living memory and what are some others you predict will soon occur?
Edit: Non-english examples very welcome!
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).
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 🤣
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.
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.
From my cold dead hands!!
Unique coming to just mean unusual.
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
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
“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.
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
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?
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
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!
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-kigIn 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.
“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.
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.
The “deci” prefix is just a coincidence then?
More like a vague gesture, which, in idiom chock-full of metonymy, is legitimate.
