Charlie wrote:
The one that makes me cringe is irregardless. It seems to be a contraction of regardless and irrespective, and is "an erroneous word that, etymologically, means the exact opposite of what it is used to express,...".
Another is decimate. "Latin decimÄtus, past participle of decimÄre to punish every tenth man chosen by lot,". When I see "Storm decimates crop" I have no clue if it destroyed a tenth, all, or some other fraction of it!
Language matters, and the English language is structured in such a way as to enable us to express ourselves precisely. If any word can be substituted for any other, and meaning is mutable, then we'd may as well just grunt at each other.
Charlie
According to my Webster's, decimate means "to kill or destroy a large part of". So while the Latin root means destruction of a tenth, in current usage the word means something else.
Words Shakespeare used, for example, have not only shifted pronunciation, but some have shifted meanings so much that we have footnotes in the texts. At what point do we say, "This in English?" 1650? 1776? 1965? 2000? The date of your graduation?
For some time, I have pictured language as a reflection of the culture. As our daily lives have become less formal, so has our language. In the 30s, for instance, most men wore suits and ties when they left the house, even if only going to the barbershop. People dressed up. They used a slightly more formal language. Now most people only wear ties at funerals (like me), and our language is correspondingly more casual. Whether or not that is a good thing is a subject to debate.
