Language shift is unavoidable, and passing fads of cultural catch phrases and idioms are to be enjoyed. Word’s meanings shift, begin to lose force, take on secondary contrary meanings, and eventually come to mean something wholly different. Idioms that become popular in one field may cross to join the confusing jargon of business analysis, or of political discourse, or of art, and so on.
Some are becoming ambiguously hyperbolic jumbles. Ranting about these is silly, but given the shifts they are undergoing, perhaps they are best avoided in your writing.
A Perfect Storm has become the new “we believe we have found all factors leading to the undesired event, and most of them were somewhat undesirable themselves.” It is a complex world and many of our systems are tightly linked, that does not make every event a perfect storm.
Carrot and Stick is a nice idiom: influence others by withholding a promised reward; as when dangling a carrot from a stick in front of a donkey. It is shifting to suggest influencing others by alternating between delivering a promised reward when small goals are met and punishing with a big stick when small goals are not met.
Sea Change isn’t just a morose Beck album, it is from Shakespeare’s Tempest:
“Full fathom five thy father lies,
Of his bones are coral made,
Those are pearls that were his eyes,
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea change,
into something rich and strange,
Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell,
Ding-dong.
Hark! now I hear them, ding-dong, bell.”
That sounds like a classical metamorphosis to me, not something one experiences when taking on a new job, or doing the same job in a slightly different environment.
Decimate now needs to be used with supporting evidence or abandoned until it has fully lost it’s one-tenth reduction meaning and finally rests as a synonym for annihilated.
The pronunciation of nuclear wants to change to nukular very badly. Nuclaer is awkward; the hard stop of the ‘c’ using the back of the tounge is followed by the ‘l’ formed with the front of the tounge – unavoidably prone to shift.
A martini has become a call drink; with so many drinks ending in -tini and the blur between vodka and gin, abandon all hope of restoring the proper gin to vermouth ratio and order a Hendricks-rocks.
Language change tends to slow, I’m told, as literacy rates increase. With just-in-time learning, will this slow even further? No more will we have to guess at what it means to throw someone under the bus, we can Google it.
Did you think I actually knew that Tempest passage?