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Comment by aikah | Hacker News Reader

Apocalypse means "revelation".

I hate when people use that word like it means "the end of society as we know it",or like it's "madmax time" or something.

Apocalypse is of religious nature.It has nothing to do with a "global catastrophe.".

Aren't scientists supposed to be smarter than the rest of us?How can they continue to spread that non-sense?

PS:I'm not religious.But the word Apocalypse has a specific meaning.

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Language is a slippery thing, and meanings of words change over time. Here's a short story illustrating how absurd it would be if we insisted all the words were used in their original sense: http://unabridged.merriam-webster.com/blog/2014/08/quest-pos... "The lord, the bishop, and the harlot: an etymological fallacy"

> a great disaster : a sudden and very bad event that causes much fear, loss, or destruction

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/apocalypse

While we're on the subject of pet-peeves, I hate it when people speak of an "existential threat". That has absolutely nothing to do with Existentialism.[1] What people probably mean when they use that term is "a threat to ___'s existence". "existence" != "existential".

I also hate it when people say "hackers" when the proper term for what they mean is "crackers".[2]

And I hate it when people say "Linux" when they should properly say "GNU/Linux".

But I rarely complain about these pet-peeves of mine, since I recognize that language is a living, changing, growing thing, out of the control of any one person or small group of people, though the French language police[3] and dictionary publishers may disagree.

[1] - http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/existentialism/

[2] - http://catb.org/jargon/html/C/cracker.html

[3] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minister_of_Culture_%28France%...

Go ahead, submit the last 10,000 posts you've placed on the internet, and then subject them to a group of anal literalists.

To use proper terminology in all domains at all time as all domains rapidly evolve is an impossibility.

If you're smart enough to be anal about these distinctions, you're smart enough to develop an error correction and handling layer.

The word "existential" (attested since the late 17th century) was used as an adjective relating to existence long before the birth of Existentialism. In the phrase "existential threat", there is no cause of confusion (unless there is cause to speak of threats relating to Existentialism). So I don't have a problem with this usage.

Is there another word that better (or even similarly) captures what "apocalypse" has come to mean? I don't know of one, and I think it is a useful thing to have a word for. It is almost never worth fighting a word's widely-understood meaning. (Although I was definitely disappointed when dictionaries added an alternate definition of "literally" as meaning "figuratively"...)

The technically correct term is "eschaton", but no one uses that and everyone uses "apocalypse". I don't think this is a battle worth fighting.

The Illuminatus Trilogy does.[1]

Immanentize the Eschaton!

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Illuminatus!_Trilogy

"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immanentize_the_eschaton"

Speaking for myself, I'm going to start dropping "eschaton" in everyday conversation.

Neat. I actually knew that word, because it's the name of a fictional game in the book Infinite Jest, but I never put two and two together.

The meaning of words evolve and are adapted. It clearly refers to "an event involving destruction or damage on an awesome or catastrophic scale"

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