created 2025-03-14, & modified, =this.modified
Note
Some of these examples? Organic Model Collapse?
Examples
- Awful - literally “full of awe” originally meant inspiring wonder, or fear. In contemporary use it means “extremely bad”
- Awesome - meant “awe-inducing” but now means “extremely good”
- Terrible - meant “inspiring terror” but now means “extremely bad”
- Terrific - originally meant “inspiring terror” but now means “spectacularly good”
- Nice - meant “foolish, ignorant, senseless” but now means “kind and thoughtful”
- Gay - meant “lighthearted, and joyous”
Forces triggering change
- linguistic forces
- psychological forces
- sociocultural forces
- cultura/encyclopedic forces
- Fuzziness (i.e., difficulties in classifying the referent or attributing the right word to the referent, thus mixing up designations)
- Dominance of the prototype (i.e., fuzzy difference between superordinate and subordinate term due to the monopoly of the prototypical member of a category in the real world)
- Social reasons (i.e., contact situation with “undemarcation” effects)
- Institutional and non-institutional linguistic pre- and proscriptivism (i.e., legal and peer-group linguistic pre- and proscriptivism, aiming at “demarcation”)
- Flattery
- Insult
- Disguising language (i.e., “misnomers”)
- Taboo (i.e., taboo concepts)
- Aesthetic-formal reasons (i.e., avoidance of words that are phonetically similar or identical to negatively associated words)
- Communicative-formal reasons (i.e., abolition of the ambiguity of forms in context, keyword: “homonymic conflict and polysemic conflict”)
- Wordplay/punning
- Excessive length of words
- Morphological misinterpretation (keyword: “folk-etymology”, creation of transparency by changes within a word)
- Logical-formal reasons (keyword: “lexical regularization”, creation of consociation)
- Desire for plasticity (creation of a salient motivation of a name)
- Anthropological salience of a concept (i.e., anthropologically given emotionality of a concept, “natural salience”)
- Culture-induced salience of a concept (“cultural importance”)
- Changes in the referents (i.e., changes in the world)
- Worldview change (i.e., changes in the categorization of the world)
- Prestige/fashion (based on the prestige of another language or variety, of certain word-formation patterns, or of certain semasiological centers of expansion)
Dead Metaphor
A figure of speech which has lost the original imagery by extensive, repetitive and popular usage. They result from semantic shift, a process called the literalization of a metaphor.
An example would be a origin entirely unknwon to majority of people like “to kick the bucket” or whose symbolism is easily understood but not thought about “the idea of falling in love”.
The wings of a plane now no longer seem to metaphorically refer to a bird’s wings; rather, the term ‘wing’ was expanded to include non-living things.