Language changes all the time. Some changes really are chaotic, and disruptive. Take decimate, a prescriptivist shibboleth. It comes from the old Roman practice of punishing a mutinous legion by killing every 10th soldier (hence that deci- root). Now we don’t often need a word for destroying exactly a 10th of something – this is the ‘etymological fallacy’, the idea that a word must mean exactly what its component roots indicate. But it is useful to have a word that means to destroy a sizeable proportion of something. Yet many people have extended the meaning of decimate until now it means something approaching ‘to wipe out utterly’.
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We are all tempted to think that complex systems need management, a benign but firm hand.
Broadly trusting the distributed intelligence of your fellow humans to keep things in order can be hard to do, but it’s the only way to go.
Language is self-regulating. It’s a genius system – with no genius.
in 'Who decides what words mean?'
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