You sound like you consider all linguistic evolution to be a bad thing. I’m not saying there shouldn’t be opposition to change, indeed opposition helps to filter out pointless change, while worthwhile change will tend to overcome that opposition. So go ahead and be that opposition if you will, but it just seems like a limited perspective to me.
It reminds me of my English teachers at school who impressed upon me that it’s incorrect to use the pronouns “they/them” in a singular, non-gender-specific context. So you had to go with the traditional but sexist “he” or an awkwardly pseudo-random distribution of “he” and “she”, despite the fact that “they” was in common use colloquially. Perhaps my teachers’ fervent opposition was only fueled by the fact that it was a language problem which popular usage had already solved. They were fighting a valiant rearguard action against common sense, and I’m glad they lost.
But, you’re just one person. You won’t be present for 99.9999%+ of newer usages of terms, so you’ll be impotent to effect much change on the matter. With the level of illiteracy and the anti-intellectualism that seems rampant these days, even having a widely read column on a popular platform might be insufficient to turn such a tide. Maybe at best you’d be a screenwriter for a Hollywood blockbuster that a decent portion of the population watches and you could hope for the best, but even that seems weak considering we collectively don’t even remember movie lines accurately ten or twenty years later.
And we can work to stop it from becoming more common by nipping it in the bud.
At least you turned up to the fight.
Which is why change should be gradual and limited, otherwise two people who use that language are unable to clearly communicate.
Clear communication is so Ohio, I’ve got rizz.
Or something. I’m too old to make this joke.
You sound like you consider all linguistic evolution to be a bad thing. I’m not saying there shouldn’t be opposition to change, indeed opposition helps to filter out pointless change, while worthwhile change will tend to overcome that opposition. So go ahead and be that opposition if you will, but it just seems like a limited perspective to me.
It reminds me of my English teachers at school who impressed upon me that it’s incorrect to use the pronouns “they/them” in a singular, non-gender-specific context. So you had to go with the traditional but sexist “he” or an awkwardly pseudo-random distribution of “he” and “she”, despite the fact that “they” was in common use colloquially. Perhaps my teachers’ fervent opposition was only fueled by the fact that it was a language problem which popular usage had already solved. They were fighting a valiant rearguard action against common sense, and I’m glad they lost.
But, you’re just one person. You won’t be present for 99.9999%+ of newer usages of terms, so you’ll be impotent to effect much change on the matter. With the level of illiteracy and the anti-intellectualism that seems rampant these days, even having a widely read column on a popular platform might be insufficient to turn such a tide. Maybe at best you’d be a screenwriter for a Hollywood blockbuster that a decent portion of the population watches and you could hope for the best, but even that seems weak considering we collectively don’t even remember movie lines accurately ten or twenty years later.
But, together we’re 2 people. And we can recruit more to the army.
“I don’t want to belong to any club that would accept me as one of its members.”