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by curun1r 2958 days ago
In some cases, that's true. But not when it's a technical term that has a specific technical meaning. A good example of this is psychological terminology. The general public has latched onto terms like depression and borderline but uses them in ways that are incompatible with the real diagnoses. This causes real issues for people suffering from those illnesses since lay people mistakenly believe they have some idea of what those people are dealing with. The psychological community is vastly outnumbered by the general public, but their definitions remain the official meaning of those words.

Similarly, we can't claim that centrifugal and centripetal forces are the same things just because more than 90% of the population uses the term centrifugal for both. Some words have specific meanings that don't change no matter how many ignorant idiots decide them mean something else.

1 comments

Come on. Watching a film vs. a movie isn't a technical term, it's something that everyone uses all the time, and the dictionary disagrees with your pedantry. You're just wrong here.