October 28th, 2025
I'm an aficionado of fine words, I cherish words that express an idea powerfully. A few good examples:
Feckless: impotent (note the cognation with “fuck”)
Sometimes foreign words capture an idea inexpressible in a few English words. Here are two German words I adore:
Schadenfreude: taking pleasure in another’s misfortune
Schwerpunkt: the point of maximum effort. Often used in military contexts, but not limited to those
But then there’s semantic spread: the abuse of fine words. Here are three particularly upsetting cases
Incredibly
This means unbelievably or inconceivably, but beginning about a century ago, some assholes began using it as an intensifier. Now, we already have a perfectly functional intensifier, but no, these jerks decided to ruin a perfectly good word. Here’s Google’s history of how unbelievably has been twisted and tortured
Disgusting, isn’t it?
Arrogant
This word is derived from arrogate, a verb meaning “to take privileges that one has not earned”. But look how the frequency of its usage has changed over the years; now most people take it to mean proud.
Note how it slowly declined in usage in the first half of the twentieth century, then began a slow climb over the last 75 years. Atrocious! Despicable!
Gaslight
Here we have the most reprehensible case of semantic spread. This is not merely ignorant misuse of a word: it is an outright kidnapping, and enslavement of a great word to lesser meaning. It has had three meanings. The first meaning appears in the frequency graph in the late nineteenth century:
Here its meaning was literal: the use of gas (not gasoline) as a source of illumination. Lamps using gas became quite popular in the late 1800s, and continued well into the 1930s. But in 1944, a movie entitled “Gaslight” presented a clever plot in which the villain commits a murder, but his wife sees incriminating evidence, so the villain engages in abusive manipulation to convince her not to believe what she saw with her own eyes. Since people were using electric lights by that time, the term gas light was no longer useful, but it was quickly recruited to refer to the technique used in the movie. Thus was born the second meaning of the term: to deceive by manipulating a person to reject the evidence they have plainly seen. This was a great word describing a specific kind of mendacity, and was thus quite useful.
But in the last 25 years, we have seen this splendid verb stolen by ignorant fools and used to mean merely to lie.We already have plenty of words that communicate that idea: deceive, fib, delude, misrepresent, snow, mislead, misstate, dupe, hoodwink, dissemble, falsify, dissimulate, misinform, gull. With all these fine words to communicate the notion, why did these idiots need to degrade a excellently specific word to lesser work? Shameful!