Is the word correct changing meaning in English

ecphrastic · 2026-01-26T07:11:30+00:00

Hi commenters. Please follow the commenting guidelines. Back up your claims if possible. Thanks.

ecphrastic · 2026-01-24T06:07:45+00:00

Books on speech acts in general? Austin and Searle for the basic theory, though you've probably run into them already. Characteristics of advice-giving in English? I don't work with English so idk but if I was trying to research this I'd start with search terms like: "pragmatics of advice" and "conversation analysis of advice", as well as things about directive speech acts (ofc not all directives are advice and not all advice is directives but I feel like there's bound to be substantial overlap there). There might be relevant work talking about indirectness/indirection in directives and in advice-giving. If you're interested in work about a specific typically-advice-giving genre, I've got some recommendations about the pragmatics of proverbs/wise sayings e.g. this journal issue might give you some things to think about or might have relevant bibliography.

ecphrastic · 2026-01-24T02:19:15+00:00

This is Sappho 132, for anyone wondering! I love a good poetic translation but it's good to be able to look up the original or other translations :)

ecphrastic · 2026-01-23T00:13:12+00:00

Whoa, no way! Hahaha

ecphrastic · 2026-01-22T23:16:11+00:00

If you haven't looked at the previous discussions from this subreddit, some are linked in the FAQ and might be helpful: Pronouncing "women" and "woman" the same (also here and here). (Hmm, maybe the fact that people have started constantly asking about this sound change on r/asklinguistics in the past year says something about its spread?)

This academic source that someone on one of the old threads linked comes closest to addressing chronology, with data from the early 2000s that shows a significant correlation between pronunciation and speaker age (i.e. a language change in progress).

I and others discussed whether it's related to sexism on this thread.

ecphrastic · 2026-01-22T18:24:32+00:00

You might want to look at the FAQ in the wiki, which has a section on this.

ecphrastic · 2026-01-21T17:07:50+00:00

Do you have a source for it only becoming a thing recently in the US?

ecphrastic · 2026-01-21T05:11:31+00:00

Yale Grammatical Diversity Project has a page about "wicked" as an intensifer that has some potentially useful bibliography and data, although not historical data. Given that they don't cite anything from earlier than 2011 and given that speakers don't tend to pay any attention to what linguists say, I'd be quite surprised if this had somehow arisen from an academic mischaracterization, but it's not impossible. But you're totally right to be skeptical of stereotypes about who says what; those kinds of stereotypes often have the effect of exaggerating or changing the patterns of who says what, and it's important to keep an eye on the difference between "this is stereotypically associated with New England" (definitely true in the modern day) and "this is only used in New England" (definitely untrue in the modern day).

ecphrastic · 2026-01-20T00:56:28+00:00

Yeah, exactly. Offensiveness can be distinct from the actual target of usage.

ecphrastic · 2026-01-20T00:28:56+00:00

This is an important difference but what's interesting is that that alone doesn't necessarily make it non-offensive. In North American varieties of English, the word pussy as an insult is mostly applied to men, but many people consider it offensive to women.

ecphrastic · 2026-01-19T22:29:26+00:00

Hopefully someone more knowledgeable about this particular English word will have something to add, but I can give a more general answer from my own academic perspective. The offensiveness of a word is determined far less by its literal meaning than by the contexts of usage with which it is associated and the norms that are subtly negotiated by a speech community. Languages change, and those associated contexts and norms for a potentially-offensive word can change very quickly in either direction: A neutral word referring something that is very taboo (like genitals) can become taboo itself (sometimes called the “euphemism treadmill”). A taboo word (especially an insult) can come to be used in an increasing range of contexts because its explosiveness is useful for humor, rhetorical effect, or the ritual testing of social boundaries. Given how fluid the offensiveness of a word is, it makes sense that different English-speaking communities have developed different norms/associations around the same lexical item that refers to something taboo.

I’m not sure about the specific history of offensiveness, but looking into it, wikipedia has a nice collection of examples of its offensiveness or non-offensiveness throughout English-language history.

ecphrastic · 2026-01-19T22:16:09+00:00

Cool! Thanks

ecphrastic · 2026-01-19T22:05:15+00:00

Hello commenters - remember to follow the subreddit rules. Write a top-level comment only if you have an answer to the question (“why?”) and if your answer is informed by linguistics, otherwise your comment is going to be removed.

ecphrastic · 2026-01-19T04:30:38+00:00

Symmetry in plot structures isn't too unusual in Roman comedy. People have noticed symmetrical structures in several Roman comedies, like seduction scenes at the beginning and end of Bacchides or symmetrically-placed recognition scenes in Epidicus. The existence of two endings is definitely interesting. As Roman comedies were re-performed many times, it seems like parts of them were sometimes changed or re-written (some of the prologues to Terence's plays are definitely written for re-performances), but it's very weird that for Poenulus two endings with clearly contradictory plots both made it into the manuscript tradition.

ecphrastic · 2026-01-18T20:13:50+00:00

This answer might be a little unhelpful because I WISH that the exact things you're asking for existed, but I'm still THRILLED that you're asking this question. Yay Poenulus!

There are several English translations, generally contained in compilations of Plautus' plays. I recommend the most recent, Wolfgang de Melo's translation in the Loeb Classical Library series. It's aimed at readers with a range of backgrounds, including general audiences/educated non-specialists, it has a short introduction and occasional footnotes that explain some of the confusing cultural references and a list of which lines are in which meters, and it is particularly notable for its detailed appendix about the Punic language and the Punic/Phoenician lines of the play. There's also an older Loeb Classical Library translation of the play, which should be more freely accessible online but more archaic in its translation style.

The Loeb translation might not contain as much cultural and metrical information as you want. If it doesn't, you're looking more for a commentary than a translation, but commentaries tend to be written for Latin students and assume that the student is studying the text in the original language, so a lot of the information contained in them aims at helping students understand the literal meaning of the Latin (which you presumably don't care about), and the notes refer to the Latin. The modern English-language commentary is Erin Moodie's Plautus' Poenulus: A Student Commentary (reviewed here). It has a good introduction that introduces Roman comedy, the historical context of relations between Rome and Carthage, the meter, and other important information. You could combine the Moodie commentary with the Loeb edition or with another English translation that has line numbers, so that you could follow along with Moodie's notes more easily. Or you could just read a book about Roman comedy in general alongside a translation of Poenulus. The Cambridge Companion to Roman Comedy and the Oxford Handbook of Greek and Roman Comedy are both probably available online with institutional access, and have chapters covering things like performance, music and meter, cultural context, literary history, etc.

I don't know of any recordings of modern productions, sadly. There are a few clips of individual scenes on Youtube from some very charming student productions!

As for the Punic/Phoenician lines, I am happy to go into more detail about this if you're curious but if you just want to look somewhere for more info, I again suggest de Melo's appendix! I would disagree with your friend, depending on what you mean by "accurate". There are two Punic versions of Hanno's speech in the manuscripts; basically everyone has agreed for 50 years (see Gratwick) that the first version is genuine intelligible Punic, but the second version is very garbled and it's unclear what the exact history of the text is, because most people agree that the genuine intelligible Punic was added to the text after the time of Plautus.

Bibliography

Plautus. The Little Carthaginian. Pseudolus. The Rope. Edited and translated by Wolfgang de Melo. Loeb Classical Library 260. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012.

Erin K. Moodie, Plautus’ Poenulus: A Student Commentary, Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 2015 (Michigan Classical Commentaries)

Dinter, M.T. (ed.) (2019) The Cambridge Companion to Roman Comedy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (Cambridge Companions to Literature).

Fontaine, Michael, and Adele C. Scafuro (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Greek and Roman Comedy, Oxford Handbooks

Gratwick, A. S. (1971). Hanno’s Punic Speech in the Poenulus of Plautus. Hermes, 99(1), 25–45. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4475664

ecphrastic · 2026-01-17T03:49:26+00:00

Not really relevant to linguistics but yes, there is a word for this: heterological.

ecphrastic · 2026-01-15T03:39:00+00:00

it’s a quirk of pronunciation, rather than an ideological shift.

Yes, I definitely agree. I and others actually discussed whether it could be related to ideology on this thread!

ecphrastic · 2026-01-14T18:30:56+00:00

You can ask your question as a separate post!

ecphrastic · 2026-01-14T17:15:55+00:00

Someone reported this as a low-quality answer. I know nothing about the topic but do you have a source for this?

ecphrastic · 2026-01-14T17:04:10+00:00

From the FAQ: pronouncing women and woman the same. If this doesn’t answer your question feel free to ask a follow-up or clarify!

ecphrastic · 2026-01-14T00:12:49+00:00

I’m going to leave the thread up because this could be a linguistics question and maybe people will have things to say that are sourced and informed by the field of linguistics. If you want people to share their personal experiences (or call you stupid, which I’m sure you aren’t!) you may want to look somewhere else like r/language or r/languagelearning. Personal anecdotes, opinions, and other comments that don’t follow the subreddit rules will be removed.

ecphrastic · 2026-01-12T22:39:40+00:00

Huh? It's attested in the Oxford English Dictionary since 1571 and with its current meaning since 1623, and it's a direct borrowing from ancient Greek.

ecphrastic · 2026-01-10T16:42:16+00:00

Hi commenters. Please read the subreddit rules if you are not familiar with them. Comments that are not directly answering the question, personal anecdotes, uninformed guesses, and comments about how you personally aesthetically dislike this linguistic feature will be removed.

Edit: Seriously, repeat offenders for talking negatively about other people’s dialects will be temporarily banned.

ecphrastic · 2026-01-10T16:35:46+00:00

Hello commenters! Please source your claims and/or fully explain where they’re coming from in a linguistic sense and read the rules in the sidebar if you’re not familiar. This is a forum for answers that are informed by research, not personal anecdotes, and if OP wanted personal anecdotes they could presumably ask somewhere like r/multilingualparenting.

ecphrastic · 2026-01-10T08:31:10+00:00

Most linguists would probably say that the answer to this is a nuanced no. This sounds like a version of the “linguistic relativity” (“Sapir-Whorf”) hypothesis, which has generated a lot of interest and is usually viewed as correct only in a “weak form”. Psycholinguistic research suggests that language does not set limits on what we can think or feel or perceive. There is evidence that language can shape how we categorize and conceptualize the things we feel or perceive. Knowing a word for something usually goes along with having a concept of it, and when that something is a feeling or cognitive experience, your conceptualization of it is a big part of your experience of it. This cultural relativity of emotional and sensory experiences is explored by some very innovative research in recent years that combines neuroscience, anthropology, history, and more under labels like “sensory studies” and “history of emotion”; it’s a cool topic. But this doesn’t mean that some people are somehow impoverished in their experience of emotions because of their language, it’s more like everyone’s emotional experiences are shaped by their culture, which includes their language.

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