Language is very much like that green growth on my left testes, in that it keeps growing and changing in occasionally unpalatable ways, no matter what we intend and what efforts we take.
Words rarely mean the same thing for too long. ‘Faggot’ used to be a derogatory slur of homosexuals, but now it apparently just means someone whose opinion you politely dispute online. ‘Gay’ used to mean happy, and it seems now many people are so against this shift that they attempt to make gay people’s lives as unhappy as possible. That’s brilliant! I love irony! Sherlock Holmes ejaculated over Doctor Watson many times in the 19th century, and though he would also do so countless times in early 2010s Benedict Cumberbatch fanfic, the meaning was not quite what Conan Doyle had originally intended. There have actually been over a dozen officially recognised semantic shifts that have happened since dawn this morning. At 6:46 GMT it was decreed that the word ‘viscous’ now refers to Beijing Opera. At 8:12 GMT we received news that ‘tableware’ was actually a derogatory term for people of South Vermont. We heard at 11:02 GMT that dogs were now called cats, cats were now called mice, and mice were now called Total Network Solutions. Most confusingly, we were informed at 11:53 that we could no longer call a spade a spade, but a digidigdigdigdigdigdigdigggytron*
(*I had a… different joke there… but I chickened out… Feel free to tell it if you can tell what it would have been, but give me full credit. It it’s funny. If it’s racist, then that’s your fault)
Necessary Evil 