Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by alasarmas 835 days ago
I hate to get all meta (no I don’t sorry not sorry), but there is 100% a thing where every word that means (a) some important thing and (b) some less important thing ends up being a word that, for the vast majority of people, carries something like the emotional impact of definition (a) and the actual meaning of definition (b). For example, “literally” now means “figuratively”, “scan” now means “skim”, “authentic” means “expensive”, and so on. It’s basically Gresham’s Law [0] where less-consequential definitions of words drive more-consequential definitions of the same out of the marketplace.

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gresham%27s_law