I am right. There's no reason why specific disciplines can't have their own meaning to words and phrases.
Vector, moment, impulse, circuit, computer, etc. all have historic uses that are largely forgotten today or have different meanings in different contexts. Just because a usage is old, or specific to a certain context doesn't mean that usage should be universal or part of the common tongue. Arguing that language is fixed, and should never change is arguing from a special kind of gross ignorance -- the kind where a person has learned enough to think they know it all, but don't actually know anything in particular.
I think the phrase "know enough to be dangerous" comes to mind with most proscriptivists.
If you think I'm wrong, don't ever use vector again unless it's the one I personally think it the correct singular usage, and don't ever use computer unless you are talking about a person who performs calculations.
>Nobody uses it with that meaning anymore, the phrase has taken on a different meaning.
I hear it used in its original meaning as often as I hear it being used in the other way. Losing the original meaning would be a bad thing, because it describes something that is difficult to describe, whereas 'asks me to ask this following question" is just a wordy, empty transition when usually the entire phrase should be replaced with "so."
>[So,] just how far away can you get from our world of generic convenience? And how would you figure that out?
It's trivial to statistically demonstrate that the new meaning is used far in favor of the old meaning - in language that's all that matters.
You can do this experiment yourself. You will find that the new meaning is so common, so prevalent, that you'll be hard pressed to actually find an example of the old meaning in usage beyond correcting somebody using it in the new meaning.
It's not a zero-sum game. New meaning for words and phrases don't wipe out old meanings. That's why dictionaries developed this novel technique where they list alternate definitions for words -- because all of the definitions are valid because words and phrases can have more than one meaning.
when usually the entire phrase should be replaced with "so."
I don't disagree that "so" is a more concise transition. But it can get old fast when it's used all the time. It may even be better to just ask the question with no lead in at all.
I disagree that "it begs the question" categorically doesn't have a meaning beyond the one coined from a poor translation from a Latin translation of Aristotle's original Greek. Insisting that it can only mean the logical fallacy is ignorant on several kinds of levels and only shows how little the prescriptivist knows about the phrase and how language works in general. You'll find that most aren't even aware that the English phrase we use is not even a correct translation from the Latin and the Latin is not correctly translated from the Greek! It's like a perfect storm of compounded ignoramuses.
You reply as if you think I don't know what a descriptivist is. I do. The problem is that I'm not arguing that "language is fixed, and should never change." That is a rather severe misreading of the above link. The point is that people commonly misunderstand the original usage, not that the usage has changed.
I don't think anybody misunderstands the original usage.
I think that most people don't care in the slightest how something Aristotle wrote in Greek was translated into Latin and then awkwardly translated from Latin into English in the 1500s, into an archaic predecessor of modern English that is almost but not quite intelligible to the modern ear. Prior Analytics is not the Bible, it doesn't have to be quoted verbatim in whatever translation you favor to keep Aristotle from smiting you with thunderbolts or some such.
I've definitely never met anyone who used it to mean "I'm about to ask another question" who was aware of the original meaning of the phrase when asked, so we must live at antipodes.
Vector, moment, impulse, circuit, computer, etc. all have historic uses that are largely forgotten today or have different meanings in different contexts. Just because a usage is old, or specific to a certain context doesn't mean that usage should be universal or part of the common tongue. Arguing that language is fixed, and should never change is arguing from a special kind of gross ignorance -- the kind where a person has learned enough to think they know it all, but don't actually know anything in particular.
I think the phrase "know enough to be dangerous" comes to mind with most proscriptivists.
If you think I'm wrong, don't ever use vector again unless it's the one I personally think it the correct singular usage, and don't ever use computer unless you are talking about a person who performs calculations.