*Oh when pedants
Go marching in
Oh when pedants go marching in
I’m going to be correct in my usage
Oh when pedants go marching in
And when the sun begins to shine
You know it really chaps my ass
I want to decimate language Nazis
And kill prescriptivists en masse
Oh when pedants
Go marching in
The little bastards are such prigs
They won’t get to be in that number
If they use double negatives*
Is that a trumpet or a trombone I hear?
This one gets me. I’m not terrible bothered when other people use it as an intensifier when their meaning is clear, but I can think of two times on the SDMB when I used “literally” to mean “literally” and others somehow took this to mean “not literally”. This is irritating.
In one case this wasn’t a big deal, it was just a joke in a movie thread in CS, but several posters felt the need to “correct” my statement even though it was literally true. The other time it was a GD thread where another poster went on for quite some time refusing to accept that when I said I was using a particular term literally, I really meant I was using it literally and NOT in some broader, figurative sense.
We still do have verbatim, though it doesn’t work as an adverb. Verbal(ly), the way it is used today to mean communication through speech, never made sense to me, because how else would you enter into an agreement but with words? I would think that even if both parties do successfully communicate with gestures only the meaning can still be expressed as words. I always wondered why “orally” didn’t prevail as it makes a lot more sense. On the other hand it’s arguable that the condition of being verbal is a sine qua non nearly all agreements, and in that sense the word is scarcely needed as such.
It’s written in Middle English, duh, no wonder it doesn’t resemble modern English. Comparing those two languages is like comparing Spanish to Italian.
But I do hate the trend of “decimate” becoming synonymous with “devastate.” Literally, I hate it. 
Well, I believe the point being made was that, if language never changed, Middle English would be modern English. And Spanish would be Italian. And Middle English would be Italian. And there would be no such thing as historical linguistics. And so forth…
The idea being that, hopefully, seeing how language has always been changing, no differently than how it continues to do so, will obviate the unfounded fears some have of the effects of this constant flux.
Using the word “figuratively” though deflates the hyperbole doesn’t it? It’s not an adequate substitute. I don’t get the ire for “literally.” It’s not any more obnoxious, to me, than any other figure of speed/idiom/rhetorical device. What’s next, the literalists eschewing metaphors in favor of similes because they’re more literally accurate?
Well, you can compare Spanish to Italian. They both derived quite directly from dialects of Latin. Modern Italian is just Latin ebonics. 
Mark this man (?) and mark him well,
Who deftly wrote my battle-cry, pulykamell!!
ESCHEW THE METAPHOR!
Do you think these sorts of distinctions just disappear?
Effete didn’t transform to convey limp-wristed nancyboyism overnight. Except for a brief period when it first entered the English language and was actually used a short time to describe livestock past breeding age, its “sterile/exhausted” definition was almost entirely figurative. So we could say that you had “an effete mind”, and it would mean, figuratively, that your synapses were all plum tuckered out, whereas we wouldn’t have used it to say that you were firing blanks/had a barren womb.
But then it was applied to people like English university professors. And here we’re getting fuzzy again. Are their minds worn out? Or are they a bunch of snobbish types who look down their long noses through a monocle to examine the beauty of butterflies and the foibles of lesser humans? Now, if this had been a supremely popular word, well favored by the masses of English writers and speakers, there would’ve been no doubt at this point what it meant. But it wasn’t a favored word. It was one of those effete adornments (Oh! Do I mean snobbishly worn-out or effeminate?), an obscure two-dollar word, maybe two-fitty, that some good writers throw out when they’re affecting a facade of learnedness or just playing with the language.
Nothing wrong with playing. Nothing wrong with writers having a big toolbox, neither. But if you use those fancy words in ever expanding degrees of figurative flexibility, eventually they will come untethered from their original literal meanings. This has the advantage of adaptability, but sometimes these expanded meanings muscle in onto other words’ turf. Such is the price of our eternal search for newer shinier methods of metaphorical expression.
The word effete seems to have abandoned its figurative forays and to have landed right square on top of effeminate. The figurative expansions flourished for a time, but now it seems to have settled into a new, non-figurative meaning for which we already had a word. So it goes. This is not the best of all possible linguistic worlds, but on the bright side, the word’s life is much more robust now than it ever was when it meant “exhausted”. This word is healthier than it has ever been, well known and used by great swathes of people, a situation its older use could never have claimed. And there is no telling what new distinctions might appear to distinguish it from effeminate.
And this process seems entirely lost on you. You would never have had these wonderful distinctions you claim to love so much if the language didn’t change as it does. Sometimes they work out great, and sometimes they don’t. But through all of that changing, the whiners are always complaining about something. Even when we have a fantastic bit of new differentiation, as with oblivious, there’s always some knucklehead who complains that the word doesn’t mean what it used to mean, forgetting entirely that the same language changing processes that take away distinctions are the exact same processes that created those distinctions in the first place.
Not to forget, too, that the distinctions that most people actually care about are the ones that manage to last.
With regard to some circles that would be a good question. I know a gay member here said once that his mother knew all along–because he liked to read books. :rolleyes: (at the mother, not the Doper).
I think you’ve hit the problem right there. The great swathes of people as you put it still aren’t a million writers marching. As I see it, “effete” remains largely a literary word, rarely used in everyday speech or reportage. I expect writers of the caliber in which “effete” is used to do so accurately. Middle school boys are not going to taunt a peer by calling him “effete”. In addition to the historical and social forces that have acted on the word, I suspect it was helped along significantly by those who thought that “effete” was a slightly more impressive way to say effeminate, sounding somewhat like it, but rarer and hence more authoritative.
But also the distinctions that disappear find some other way to resurface, as when English lost most of its verb inflections for number and person, but then the usage of to be as an auxiliary brought some of it back.
Please don’t use “alternate” when you mean “alternative”.
Pleeeeeeease!
Supposing one used “alternate” and meant “alternate”, but also, as a result, meant “alternative” as well, insofar as that the sense of “alternate” they were employing was the same as that of “alternative”, as they were capable of using both words to mean the same thing…
Given that this is a common and, I would wager, damn near universally understood manner of speaking, why shouldn’t they, if that was what came naturally to them?
They are the overwhelming majority of people who use the word. The “worn out” definition of effete still shows up, but very seldom compared to the meaning of “overrefined/snobby/effeminate”. The people who bother using the word are largely agreed on the modern definition.
They are doing so accurately. Grammatical and semantic correctness is determined by usage. Check any reputable dictionary and you’ll find a long list of accurate definitions.
If anyone is inaccurate or imprecise in their language, it’s the people who cling to the outdated definition. Their blind adherence to etymology in spite of the facts of contemporary usage is a sign of both poor thinking and poor communication. They would rather confuse their audience with nearly obsolete semantic preferences than write clearly and well.
Some distinctions do resurface. Others do not. English did not develop additional grammatical markers to make up for the loss of formality differences in second-person speech.
If there’s no pressing need for a distinction, it won’t come back.
Because it’s redundancy.
“Alternate” means back and forth, first one and then the other.
“Alternative” means the other option.
Why have a single word with two meanings, when there are already two words with separate meanings?
Because that’s the way things are? What’s the problem with it? You complain about “redundancy”, but as far as I can see, this just amounts to taking issue with the existence of synonyms, which is… bizarre. And complaining about a single word having multiple meanings is no less bizarre; it’s not as though this is an isolated example of a rare and noteworthy phenomenon in language. Almost all words have multiple meanings, to some degree or another. It hasn’t seemed to have caused any harm so far.
Incidentally, where do the wild roses grow? The Oxford English Dictionary suggests that use of “alternate” in the senses you are unhappy with is more popular in America than in Britain.
The wild roses grow in Australia, as according to Nick Cave.
As long as in my personal life somebody can understand what I said or wrote, whether or not it’s thoroughly technically correct doesn’t matter to me. My friend disagrees with me about this a lot. He’s always giving me crap about misusing words like “aggravate”, which I use interchangeably with “annoy”. I’m like, lighten up.
The only exception is written and spoken stuff I do for work which has to be as perfect as I can possibly make it in every way. I am happy to comply with that.
As far as the pedantry on this message board goes, because everybody is so precise about citing and definitions, I think of this as a good way to learn stuff. If I need to know something and I doubt what I have read here I go look it up.
It’s all good!
Why? Because that’s how language works. It’s full of contradiction, redundancy, and idiom. Attempts at designing new speaking methods have been, to a one, absymal failures.
Goethe said, “From the crooked timber of humanity nothing straight was ever made,” and this is one of my all-time favorite quotes. It applies to language as much as to anything else.
Complaining about it is like complaining about our 23 chromosomes. Ain’t gonna do a lick of good.
I don’t think anyone is suggesting that instead of for instance “His career literally skyrocketed” people should say “His career figuratively skyrocketed”. But the “literally” could easily be left out altogether: “His career skyrocketed”. If some further emphasis is needed then there are all kinds of other words one might use depending on the situation, such as “His career suddenly skyrocketed”.
*As I said above, I have run into problems in the past where I used “literally” literally and was not understood. This is because the word is so often used as a generic intensifier with no additional meaning intended. Now I know to be more careful, but since similar words like “actually”, “really”, and “truly” are already used as generic intensifiers there isn’t always a good synonym for “literally” that will be understood.
For those annoyed by the drifting definition of “effete” who are worried there might not be a good replacement, may I suggest “jejune?” Similar meaning, and it’s a severely underused term that’s unlikely to gain enough common currency to go drifting off anytime soon. Plus, it’s a great word, especially to pronounce.