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!

  • chunes@lemmy.world
    2·
    8 hours ago

    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).

  • Ydna@lemmy.world
    5·
    23 hours ago

    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”

    • BCsven@lemmy.ca
      2·
      1 day ago

      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

  • CurlyWurlies4All@slrpnk.netEnglish
    21·
    2 days ago

    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.

  • likebudda@reddthat.com
    61·
    2 days ago

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

  • MrPnut@lemmy.world
    3·
    1 day ago

    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

  • _deleted_@aussie.zone
    40·
    2 days ago

    “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.

    • Klear@piefed.worldEnglish
      125·
      2 days ago

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

      • Cethin@lemmy.zipEnglish
        13·
        2 days ago

        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.

        • Klear@piefed.worldEnglish
          41·
          2 days ago

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

  • DominusOfMegadeus@sh.itjust.works
    29·
    2 days ago

    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.

    • emergencyfood@sh.itjust.works
      5·
      1 day ago

      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’.

    • southsamurai@sh.itjust.works
      4·
      1 day ago

      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.

    • Cethin@lemmy.zipEnglish
      5·
      2 days ago

      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.

    • sem@piefed.blahaj.zoneEnglish
      2·
      2 days ago

      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.

  • RavuAlHemio@lemmy.world
    14·
    2 days ago

    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.

    • AnarchistArtificer@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      2 days ago

      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)

    • Cethin@lemmy.zipEnglish
      2·
      2 days ago

      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.

  • LeftReddit2@lemmy.world
    22·
    2 days ago

    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.

  • SreudianFlip@sh.itjust.works
    4·
    2 days ago

    “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.

  • wieson@feddit.org
    31·
    1 day ago

    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