[jeremyjh]

No, actually this is just how language evolves. I'm glad we have the word "car" instead of "carriage powered by internal combustion engine" even if it confused some people 100 years ago when the term became used exclusively to mean something a bit more specfic.

Of course the jargon used in a specific sub-field evolves much more quickly than common usage because the intended audience of paper like this is expected to be well-read and current in the field already.

[smolder]

Language devolves just as it evolves. We (the grand we) regularly introduce ambiguity --words and meanings with no useful purpose, or that are worse than useless.

I'm not really weighing in on the appropriateness of the use "grok" in this case. It's just a pet peeve of mine that people bring out "language evolves" as an excuse for why any arbitrary change is natural and therefore acceptable and we should go with the flow. Some changes are strictly bad ones.

A go-to example is when "literally" no longer means "literally", but its opposite, or nothing at all. We don't have a replacement word, so now in some contexts people have to explain that they "literally mean literally".

[krapp]

Language only evolves, "devolving" isn't a thing. All changes are arbitrary. Language is always messy, fluid and ambigious. You should go with the flow because being a prescriptivist about the way other people speak is obnoxious and pointless.

And "literally" has been used to mean "figuratively" for as long as the word has existed[0].

[0]https://blogs.illinois.edu/view/25/96439

[smolder]

I'm going to take a rosier view of prescriptivists and say they are a necessary part of the speaking/writing public, doing the valuable work of fighting entropic forces to prevent making our language dumb. They don't always need to win or be right.

That's the first time I've seen literally-as-figuratively defended from a historical perspective. I still think we'd all be better off if people didn't mindlessly use it as a filler word or for emphasis, which is generally what people are doing these days that is the source of controversy, not reviving an archaic usage.

Also, it's kind of ironic you corrected my use of "devolves", where many would accept it. :)

[mdp2021]

> devolving isn't a thing

Incompetent use is devolution.

[gorjusborg]

Also being overlooked is that the nuances in what we accept is in large part how we define group culture.

If you want to use the word 'irregardless' unironically there are people who will accept that. Then there are the rest of us.

[kaba0]

Just as an added data point, some languages (e.g. Hungarian) do use double negative “natively”, and I have definitely caught myself having to fight some native expression seeping into my English, including ‘irregardless’. For example a Hungarian would say “I have never done nothing bad” over “anything bad”, but it is used not in a logical sense, but more as an emphasis, perhaps?

(!)Regardless, what I’m trying to say is that due to the unique position of English as the de facto world language, it has to “suffer” some non-idiomatic uses seeping in from non-natives. Actually, I would go even further and say that most smaller languages will slowly stop evolving and only English will have that property going forward (most new inventions no longer gets a native name in most languages, the English one is used).

[gorjusborg]

> No, actually this is just how language evolves

Stop making 'fetch' happen, it's not going to happen.