Definition Prediction
By Steve GillmanLanguage is a slippery thing. Although many people have the idea that words have “official” meanings that are somehow set in stone, this obviously isn’t true. A word means whatever a culture takes it to mean, and that changes continually. Consider how different the meaning of the word “gay” is now from when it meant just “happy.” And apart from radical new meanings like that, the connotations of words change continually. “Justice,” for example, while having nominally the same meaning over the last two hundred years, certainly has a different “flavor” now.
What got me thinking about this was yet another “improvement” to my Hotmail email account. My immediate reaction was “Oh no, not again!” Virtually every “improvement” has made it worse. More features that I don’t need clog up the space and confuse the process. I pay for my account instead of using the free version, and I had hoped that this would exempt me from their constant “upgrading,” but they force the changes on my account anyhow.
This is not an isolated case. In the world of computers it is common to have “improvements” that make things worse. Adobe readers, for example, still allow you to read an ebook or other PDF - which is all you want them for - but as each new and “better” version comes out, it takes more and more time to open your documents, and the program takes ever increasing amounts of rersources to run on your computer.
I don’t want to get into the marketing reasons for these things happening. What is interesting here is that there is the real possibility that the word “improvement” will morph into it’s opposite meaning in just a matter of a decade or two. It may soon mean, “Changes that make a product less functional.” To be honest, that is how I already think of the word whenever I see it in relation to software (consider Windows Vista, Microsoft’s “improvement” on Windows XP).
That got me to thinking about a new hobby or field: definition prediction. I’m not sure what useful purpose it would serve, but it might be fun to try to predict the future definitions and connotations and “flavors” of words. It would have required a long life in the past to see if your skill at this was any good, but changes are happening faster now.
So what will “honest” mean to the next generation? A politician who only lies 50% of the time? What will “morality” mean? And what about “green” (the political term)? For tht latter, what about more subtle changes. What would the average temperature stated be if you asked people now what constituted a “hot” day? What will the answer be in fifty years? What do we think of when we hear the word “luck” and how will that change?
Maybe I’ll put a definition prediction page up on the site in the future, and leave it there for a couple decades to see how accurate my guesses are.
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Tags: definition, meaning, prediction, words