While we’re at it, people need to stop calling homosexuals “gay”.
That’s wrong. Gay obviously means happy.
I decline the invitation to join Prescriptivists Club
It’s almost like words and phrases can have multiple meanings, and they may change over time.
Perhaps you are unfamiliar with what “term of art” means. That is a word used in a very specific way by a particular speech community. Outside that community, other usages may be used.
Reminds me of a joke from during the (second?) Gulf War after a bomb was dropped that was intended directly for Hussein…
Saddam Hussein’s second-in-command rounds up all Hussein’s doubles in the aftermath of the explosion. “I have good news and bad news” he says to them.
“The good news is, our great leader survived the explosion!”
“The bad news is, he lost an arm and a leg.”
[quote=“Telemark, post:18, topic:1001888, full:true”]
No, Cambridge Dictionary does not endorse any use other than the one from the film industry. Examples, pulled from the internet at random, don’t always stick to that usage, but they are just there as examples and I don’t think qualify as correct usage exacept in a grammatical sense.
True - I’ll accept those as legitimate applications, again from the film biz.
True, but in this case it’s very clear from where, amd at what time (1983 when the movie came out) the term crossed over into common usage, but it’s a misreading of how the term was applied in its limited film-jargon coinage; the “body” appendage is confusing if one wants to expand it to general use; there were already terms (“double” by itself being one) that conveyed the sense of a person used as a decoy. It’s still not too late to quash this clumsy and ill-informed piece of mission creep, please tell me you will keep that in mind and refuse to transmit this virus and we can go back to being a civilized society.
Even if it were a worthy goal (which it isn’t) language doesn’t work that way.
Body double in this context doesn’t seem to mean someone with the same body type as it does in movies. It seems to be analogous with “body guard,” with the implication that this is the body that would take the bullet for you.
I believe there are more specific terms for the acting situation, like hand double or even apparently “nude double.”
Woah woah woah. A virus is a microbe that infects living cells. Let’s keep that in mind and avoid using terms in any way other than in the one single specific context they were originally used for.
Here’s another expression from cinema, circa 1974:
Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown.
I presume this is performance art.
Did you just use some jargon to describe jargon?
It’s jargon all the way down.
If so (and it isn’t), it’s nothing but an attempt after the fact to justify the inclusion of “body” into the mistaken adoption of the term. Once you know where “body double” came from, you start to look rather silly.
I’m trying to get people to stop saying “free reign” and “shoe-in.”
Get in line.
Before we continue: do you think dictionaries are in the business of endorsing uses?
By their inclusion, yes. So for years they may have watched a term or a pronunciation with an eye to whether to include it. Generally they are wary of faddish uses, but if something seems to be sticking they will vote on whether to add it, often as an alternative but acceptable pronunciation or definition, taking note perhaps of how and why it deserved to be incorporated.
You are incorrect. This is not a matter of opinion. Here’s what Cambridge says:
https://www.cambridge.org/gb/cambridgeenglish/better-learning-insights/corpus
They are not “endorsing” uses. They’re reporting on typical uses.
There is only one reasonable standard for whether a usage is a good usage: does it successfully communicate the speaker’s idea to the intended audience? If someone sees that it does, but tries to stop people from using it, they’re just getting in the way of language.
Okay then, if that’s not endorsement, what word would you use to describe the practice of cautious editing, waiting for something to prove its commonality before comitting it to print in a source people depend on?
The Oxford folks gave the Homer Simpson-via-James Finlayson word-like object
“doh” a pass, but refuses to spell it “d’oh” like a lot of the horde because that’s just ignorant.
The last word of that sentence is a bit ironic, don’tcha think?
and, for the piece de resistance: