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Comment by skywhopper | Hacker News Reader

This is how language works. Words get tweaked, re-purposed, misunderstood, munged, combined, slurred, abused, enriched, extended, negated, confused, and broken. It's very likely you are the only person with your particular perception of any particular word and all of its connotations. But the rest of the world doesn't care. Life and language move on and evolve with or without your own favorite semantics. You can embrace and enjoy the change or whine and complain, but it will happen. Better to enjoy the ride.

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Also, to be fair, this is a borrowed and now incorporated term in the English language. If we were using Robot the way we use Robot in English in Czech, then I can see the complaint having more validity --but here it's like complaining that borrowed French words don't have the same meaning in English as they do in their native French. Or us complaining about how English words incorporated into Japanese[1] have weird idiosyncratic and unique meanings some with great distance from the original English. Imagine some learned Japanese going about how those words are used improperly and don't map perfectly to what they mean in English.

[1]http://www.sljfaq.org/afaq/false-friends.html

> If we were using Robot the way we use Robot in English in Czech

I am little confused by this, so I might be reading it wrong... In any case, the meaning of "robot" is the same in Czech as it is in English. Capek obviously did not live in an era where technology for robots as we know them today existed, however from the description of how robots were supposed to act and look like it seems very similar to later sci-fi version of "purely technological" creations.

btw, according to Czech wikipedia (that seems to be sourced to Capek's own article in Czech "Lidove noviny" daily), Capek initially considered word "labor" to be used.

Robot - robota etc is Slavic word for "work" or "labor" as you mention. Basically it was thought of as "the entity that exists to only work/produce" (and no other human-my activity whatsoever such as relax, sleep, have fun, etc.)

There's an option between whining and enjoying the ride, which seems to be missed by descriptivists: to be an active participant in language as a creative exercise. I see these etymological explorations as prime examples of participatory linguistics.

> Words get tweaked, re-purposed, misunderstood, munged, combined, slurred, abused, enriched, extended, negated, confused, and broken

Or as I call it, twepurdgerruchxtegused

ken

Google sure is fast:

https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&e...

give them some time to crawl and this will be the only hit when googling that!! (I'ok add a reminder to check in 1 week from now!)

Is that the same kind of phenomenon we see with words/phrases like Sharing Economy, Fake News, Throwing Shade?

I'm pretty sure Dawkins isn't too thrilled with how 'meme' is used nowadays, either. Such is life.

I hope he'd appreciate the memetic irony that the word has taken on a life of its own

> You can embrace and enjoy the change or whine and complain, but it will happen. Better to enjoy the ride.

Yup, I whined and complained about "hackers" (you mean crackers!!) for a long time until I realised it was futile.

Except on Wikipedia, where words get disambiguated and wikilinked, slowly encouraging people towards a shared vocabulary and understanding. Robots are machines, androids are artificial people, bots are software, robo- is just a general neologism for new concepts. Nobody's hijacked robot, just derived new terms.

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