Mark A Mandel <mam at theworld.com> writes: > On Thu, 15 Aug 2002, Chris Olson - SunPS wrote: > > #I believe I agree. At any rate, I've always felt it > #would be better to create new words for new concepts and > #ideas, rather than change the meaning of old words. > > However, human nature, as displayed by the history of languages, > disagrees with you. When you speaking of hailing a cab, you don't think > of a cabriolet ("cab" for short), a two-wheeled, two-seat, one-horse > carriage with a folding top; but that's where the name came from. And > when you read "carriage" in the previous sentence you probably weren't > connecting it with "carry", but that's its origin. Word meanings and > usages have fuzzy boundaries, and extending them is natural. We would > have a much harder time communicating if we had to invent a new word > every time we encountered something that was a bit different from the > last thing we had seen that was similar to it. "Cab", however, is not the same word as "cabriolet", merely a word *descended from* it. Our use of "cab" is no hindrance to people wishing to use "cabriolet" to refer to what it still, in fact, refers to. And I certainly *do* connect "carriage" with "carry". One of the things I very much like about computer jargon is the tendency to borrow words that mean about the right thing and give them a specific meaning in the software context. With a twist. I'm thinking of "demon" and "cookie" and such. -- David Dyer-Bennet, dd-b at dd-b.net / New TMDA anti-spam in test John Dyer-Bennet 1915-2002 Memorial Site http://john.dyer-bennet.net Book log: http://www.dd-b.net/dd-b/Ouroboros/booknotes/ New Dragaera mailing lists, see http://dragaera.info