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Re:I'm making drugs for cats by markdown on Thursday June 16, 2022 @11:02PM (#31773706)
> Next thing you know, the words that were okay to say are verboten

So what? There are a hundred words your ancestors used that you never will. How has it changed your life one iota to have never uttered cockalorum, twitter-light, or grumpish?

> There is a perpetual movement to take words and shuffle them around

Yes, this has happened for all time.

Re:I'm making drugs for cats by iratewizard on Friday June 17, 2022 @02:36AM (#31774783)
> Yes, this has happened for all time.

No, that's a modern side effect of critical theory and grievance agitators. Nice try, though.

Re:I'm making drugs for cats by i_cannot_hack on Friday June 17, 2022 @03:52AM (#31775310)
There's some rich irony in trying to deny the existence of pejoration and semantic drift, while claiming your political enemies are out of touch with reality.

Words starting out as factual and neutral, then acquiring a negative connotation, then falling out of use except as insults is literally a tale as old as time.

> The word "idiot" comes from the Greek noun ἰδιώτης idiōtēs 'a private person, individual' (as opposed to the state), 'a private citizen' (as opposed to someone with a political office), 'a common man', 'a person lacking professional skill, layman', later 'unskilled', 'ignorant', derived from the adjective ἴδιος idios 'personal' (not public, not shared). In Latin, idiota was borrowed in the meaning 'uneducated', 'ignorant', 'common',[5] and in Late Latin came to mean 'crude, illiterate, ignorant'. In French, it kept the meaning of 'illiterate', 'ignorant', and added the meaning 'stupid' in the 13th century. In English, it added the meaning 'mentally deficient' in the 14th century.

> The word shit appears to have originally been a euphemism for defecation in Pre-Germanic, as the Proto-Indo-European root *sḱeyd-, from which it was derived, meant 'to cut off'.

> In the 20th century, where the old euphemisms lavatory (a place where one washes) or toilet (a place where one dresses[20]) had grown from widespread usage (e.g., in the United States) to being synonymous with the crude act they sought to deflect, they were sometimes replaced with bathroom (a place where one bathes), washroom (a place where one washes), or restroom (a place where one rests)

Re:I'm making drugs for cats by iratewizard on Friday June 17, 2022 @09:16AM (#31777653)
You're conflating morphology with the cult-like zealotry against the four olds.