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Comment by miloignis | Hacker News Reader

No, nothing is sacred. I'll note the "literally" case in GP is arguably even more of a flip than drop.

The only way for a human language to stay the same is for people to stop speaking it, i.e. Latin - France has trouble keeping French the same, and English is the polar opposite with no ruling body and a history of katamari damacy-ing words from every other language.

Words can mean multiple things, and if there's enough of a gap a new word or usage will rise to fill its place.

Delete works, of course, and I think the opposite to "new feature just dropped" in tech circles is "killed" or "killed off", as in killedbygoogle.com

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Boolean constructs are sacred. This includes words like "yes", "no", "true", and "false". Without these holding on to their meaning, the language, the culture, and civilization will fall apart. "Dropped" is very close to them. "Delete" works for now, but give it a century, and we could lose it too because the click-generating hipsters are always on the lookout for new words to exploit.

Boolean constructs certainly aren't sacred, and we have a million synonyms for both yes and no should the need arise.

Civilization will certainly not fall apart if language changes again, as it has for the entire history of spoken language - notably, Old English would be unintelligible to most of us now and civilization is working just fine. I just learned looking this up that Early English had a 4-form system consisting of yea/nae/yes/no ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yes_and_no#The_Early_English_f... ), which is fascinating, and we appear to be doing just fine without yea and nae nowadays.

Anyway, I'll note that release and drop are near-synonyms if you're talking about a physical object, so their similar use for features etc isn't wild at all, and is well established in culture (drop an album, etc), so I don't think this is nearly as big a change (like yes->no would be) as you think.

There is no universe in which release and drop are near synonyms. They're used as such only by dorks, click optimizers, and SEO scammers.

There also is no inhabited universe in which the words yes and no can survive being flipped in their meaning, because an attempt at such a flip will result in total collapse, in a universe without life.

If I'm holding a ball in my hand and then open my fingers and the ball is pulled by gravity to the floor:

Did I release the ball from my hand?

Did I drop the ball?

> There is no universe in which release and drop are near synonyms

Among several slang definitions for "drop", Oxford English Dictionary includes "To release or make available" with multiple examples going back to 1988: https://www.oed.com/dictionary/drop_v?tab=meaning_and_use#60...

> They're used as such only by dorks, click optimizers, and SEO scammers.

That's clearly not true.

Everyone has their pet peeves, but this is a ridiculous thing to post a "Tell HN" about.

"Yeah, yeah." in a sarcastic tone of voice means "no". Also see the opposite meanings of "yeah, nah" and "nah, yeah" in Midwestern US English. Or the Japanese who will say "yes" out of politeness while meaning "no" which you should be able to intuit from context. Etc.

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