I came across, "He’d lost an exponential amount of blood," in a book recently.
The weakening of the word "exponential" from meaning
"a number that gets multiplied by itself"
to just meaning "a big hulking, scary number"
is very sad.
We take these delicate, specific, useful adjectives and empty them by the slop-bucketful till they're just one more of the thousand bland, lank, meaningless synonyms for common concepts.
Our word shelves become full of Twinkies and Wonderbread.
Thank god for slang, that's what I say.
Decimated has suffered a similar decline.
ReplyDeleteSo right. Another lovely word that's been unfairly tromped on.
DeleteSeems this is a case where the word is made less useful by exaggerating its scope rather than by trivializing it. (The fall of literally rather than that of awful/awesome.)
Pity to lose decimate. We have plenty of general words to talk about catastrophes.
I can't think of another word that could provide standalone descriptor for hellacious disaster to a smallish group but escape for most.
Maybe humanity is good enough that we see the culling of ten percent as total shared disaster for all. A nice thought.
Oh. Here and elsewhere ...
DeleteI get repeats of comments and delete the extra one. That's all.
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ReplyDeleteI'm still of the opinion that there IS right and wrong in language usage/grammar - yes, yes, I get the idea that language changes and so will the rules in consequence, but at the same time, there always will be different levels of complexity and precision in speech and writing,and there are editors and beta readers and people with high standards who will use the words according to their meaning and grammar according to its rules and help maintaining/upholding them (the living language concept should not be an excuse for lowering standards of precision, complexity, richness, symbolism).
ReplyDeleteI have so much sympathy.
DeleteI grit my teeth every time prepositional like replaces the conjunction as.
The older usage is now considered "formal".
I will try not to judge harshly those who have jogged into Twenty-first-Century English at a lively clip while I creep along like a snail.
I'm still trying to get my tongue comfy with singular They in all contexts.
I work at it.