Everyone here is guilty. I at least have a valid point.
Only if you think language if static, which it demonstrably isn’t. Using the term “Body Double” in this way is perfectly cromulent.
I very much disagree that you do. Even by the low standards of prescriptivist arguments, this is weak sauce.
- It’s a young term, without a huge amount of usage history behind it.
- The expansion in meaning happened very shortly after the original usage was coined.
- The phrase makes perfect sense under the expanded meaning.
- The original meaning is extremely narrow, and would almost never come up for 99.9% of speakers.
- The expanded meaning does not obfuscate the meaning of the term in the original usage.
You’ve got a bit of interesting trivia about how the term was originally used, but I don’t see any good arguments here for why that meaning should remain static.
Yeah, there’s lots of words that started out in a specialized field that expanded into the general public with a more general meaning. “Feedback,” for instance, comes from electronics argot c. 1920. It becomes “information about the results of a process” by the 1950s. The current meaning of “meme” is a bit removed from the original one. “Bandwidth” is used beyond its original technical sense in electronics. “Bug” is used beyond its computer science sense. “Black box” originally was RAF slang for navigational instruments, then anything operating in a sealed container, like a black box recorder, and then any complex piece of equipment or piece of programming with contents not exactly known to the user. “Ground zero” literally is the point of an explosion, but now more generally means the locus of any big event.
And I can go on and on and on. This is perfectly normal and unobjectionable expansion of language from a specialized field to a more general public usage. It’s called “semantic broadening” or “semantic expansion.”
Exactly this.
My beloved wife was an elementary school teacher for several decades. She absolutely struggles with, and hates, how grammar and usage has changed over time, and she continually, reflexively corrects what she feels is incorrect usage, based on what she was taught when she was in college, in the 1980s.
Alas, it means that she comes across as a “get off my lawn” cranky old schoolteacher.
There’s some new thing about working remotely while online with other people doing unrelated work remotely because it’s supposed to help people stay productive. I think there was some thread about this.
Anyway, I just read something about that and they called it ‘body doubling’. I guess the idea is that two people working in each other’s virtual presence ‘doubles the number of bodies working’, although I didn’t get the idea it was just two people, so maybe also it could be ‘body tripling’ or ‘body quadrupling’ or ‘body n-tupling’.
So the definition of a ‘body double’ is murkier than ever.
I’m not sure I’d characterize it as “murky.” Context clarifies, as it does with many words and phrases with multiple meanings.
Yeah. I meant ‘body double’ can’t be assumed to have a single consistent definition with just some possible outlying alternative uses. As you say, it requires context to understand what it means among several possible definitions. I’d expect in the modern virtual world there will be more definitions to come.