...And now you're trotting out the laundry list of what qualifies you to say what?
My point is that the words I listed have current meanings entirely removed from the meanings they used to have, and no matter how long ago or how recently, they no longer have those meanings. Ergo, to use them in those contexts would be seen as quaintly old. We don't keep rehashing every single meaning of every single word. Why do we do so for certain words we find offensive in their old meanings?
It's also human decency to let things take their course. And linguistic course is something that's run for a lot of words. If we wanted to, we could probably find offense in half the current English language. But to strike those from our lexicon simply because of what people in the past used them as, to disregard current definitions, is to show only stubbornness.
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Date: 2011-02-04 09:08 am (UTC)My point is that the words I listed have current meanings entirely removed from the meanings they used to have, and no matter how long ago or how recently, they no longer have those meanings. Ergo, to use them in those contexts would be seen as quaintly old. We don't keep rehashing every single meaning of every single word. Why do we do so for certain words we find offensive in their old meanings?
It's also human decency to let things take their course. And linguistic course is something that's run for a lot of words. If we wanted to, we could probably find offense in half the current English language. But to strike those from our lexicon simply because of what people in the past used them as, to disregard current definitions, is to show only stubbornness.