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Comment by tormeh | Hacker News Reader

>Disasters would be magnified exponentially.

Exponentially with what? The ability of the English language to mush up words is truly astounding. And this is not even my pet peeve.

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Evolving word definitions is not the exclusive domain of the English language. That's just how human language works.

It's driven primarily by ignorance and it muddies communication, especially over time. We should maintain some degree of pressure against such unnecessary change.

It always amazes me how even smart, educated people can hold such ignorant views on linguistics. Go ahead, try and be a prescriptivist. You will lose 100% of the time.

This isn't black or white. It's about slowing the inevitable, yes, but it increases the usefulness of text over time. Less of a probability of material, including scientific, being forgotten.

What a gloriously overwrought way to spell, "it annoys me."

This isn't about some minor annoyance, I'm pointing out something I truly believe holds society back, though not necessarily to some major degree

How much literature has disappeared from history because certain languages or vernaculars fell out of use?

Hell, why do we even bother teaching classical English if it's just going to change, right? We should just let kids learn from their parents and media - no use being a prescriptivist!

And yes, I do believe that some languages and dialects are vastly more expressive and unambiguous than others, but I don't expect the average person to understand that. Ultimately we're all free to speak as we wish but don't shame me for trying to preserve the necessary consistency that makes language useful.

My intent was humorous, but not to shame; I didn't mean it to come out that way.

> How much literature has disappeared from history because certain languages or vernaculars fell out of use?

The answer is not very much, comparatively. Most of the known losses of old works has been due to destruction, not communal loss of ability to decipher. Here's a summary of objects with unknown scripts:

https://omniglot.com/writing/undeciphered.htm

That ship sailed a thousand years ago.

I think it was orders of magnitude longer ago.

(Just a joke, it was actually exponentially longer ago)

We all know that time is linear... except if you are traveling pretty fast :P

Time is linear except when you watch water waiting it to boil.

We should maintain some degree of pressure against ignorance.

Sometimes that means correct people using a word incorrectly, because that might educate them about something they didn't know.

Sometimes though that means educating people about how languages evolve and that the ship has sailed for some expressions.

Exponentially as the opposite of logarithmic. It's just a figure of speech like 'orders of magnitude'. What's fuzzy about that concept?

Hyperbole isn't exactly a new phenomenon nor is it limited to English.

With the radius of the resulting explosion maybe

I think they mean the severity of a nuclear plane crash is greater than the severity of a regular plane crash.

Incidentally, some models of civil airplanes (some 747s for instance) contain depleted uranium trimming weights, which can be hazardous if burned in a plane wreck. This is far from a plane reactor accident though, and use of these weights has been discontinued for years (I'm unsure if any are still flying.)

> I think they mean the severity of a nuclear plane crash is greater than the severity of a regular plane crash.

Yeah, I know, it's just... There are already existing words for that. Words that were in use before "exponentially" became the cool word of the week. I guess I should just accept it, that "exponentially" is going to mean the same thing as "truly", "very" and "really". At some point some newscaster is going to describe a patient's outlook as "it's not looking exponentially good". Although maybe the word has too many syllables. One can hope.

It doesn't just mean "very." It is defined as "increasing rapidly by a large amount" in several dictionaries. Sometimes we have different words for varying degrees of things, and most people seem to accept thats perfectly cromulent.

"Increasing rapidly by a large amount" is reasonable usage.

does the sentence "Disasters would be magnified increasing rapidly by a large amount" make sense though? With a little word shuffling you can get something that at least comes out as coherent, but can you make it convey an idea more complex or more clearly than "disasters would be a lot worse"?

Nuanced word selection can add clarity that would be difficult to achieve with more basic vocabulary, but too often people use wordgasms to confuddle the person they are trying to communicate with and make an otherwise vacuous statement appear more legitimate.

This is low-key pedantic

Thank the American media for their unrelenting sensationalism, that drives them on their neverending quest to find bigger and better words to describe meaningless events. Once a word is too "lit", it's discarded and the next one comes along.

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