Ice Tea and Semantic Drift
Word Matters
00:00
The Tension Between Original Meaning and Usage
There's always this tension between etymology or the actual origin of a word and usage, which is the way we simply use the word on a daily basis. I was reading some of the Thomas Jefferson letters and it's great to look sometimes as lexicographers go to a corpus of the correspondence of Abraham Lincoln or in this case Thomas Jefferson. And there was a sentence where the word jumped out at me and I realized, oh, this word wonderful that I'm so familiar with actually means something else.
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