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Do you believe words mean what they say in the dictionary, or do words mean what people use them for?
Take a look at this list in the picture for an example.
Or, another popular one is that most people call the metal casing full of bullets you put into a gun a "clip" yet, the dictionary says this is a "magazine."
If most people use a word one way, and the dictionary says something else, does that mean most people are wrong and don't understand the language they are speaking, or the dictionary is wrong and doesn't understand the language a majority of people are using? If you have to "correct" everyone else, are you the one who is wrong?
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Words seem to get into the dictionary by the way they are used.
However things like the changing definition of racism seems to me to be bogus. For example the usage of literally in that picture both are correct. It has a tradition, in the figurative sense, in literature dating back ~two centuries. However the new racism definition is ideological, rather new, and limited to one field of usage. Fine if I am frozen and revived two hundred years and 'Power + Privilege' becomes the new norm I'll have to accept that language went on without me. But I am neither going to live two hundred years ago or two hundred years into the future.
In short I think it is a little bit of both.
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>>9055315
Words mean what society decides they mean. They are nothing but sounds with an arbitrary meaning that we decide on
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>>9055315
Read Wittgenstein.
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>>9055363
On the subject next of modern use of racism, that is a definition used by sociologists to write about sociology, but unfortunately every college student who takes a basic sociology class ends up exposed to it and thinks that will change everyone else's definition.
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>>9055315
people tend to go top shelf with their words for effect, then they get watered down from overuse and we come up with new champion words
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