#semantic drift

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Dinkscrump Linkdump

I'm about to leave for a 20+ city book tour for my new novel PICKS AND SHOVELS. Catch me on Feb 14 in BOSTON for FREE at BOSKONE , and on Feb 15 for a virtual event with YANIS VAROUFAKIS. More tour dates here.

Well, Saturday's come around and I have a gigantic list of links that didn't fit into this week's newsletter, so it's time for another linkdump, 26th in the series:

https://pluralistic.net/tag/linkdump/

My posting is about to get a lot more erratic, as I'm days away from leaving on a 20+ city book-tour, which starts in Boston on Feb 14, with a sold-out event at the Brookline Booksmith:

https://brooklinebooksmith.com/event/2025-02-14/sold-out-cory-doctorow-ken-liu-picks-and-shovels

But Bostonians get another bite at the apple: I'm appearing at Boskone, the city's venerable sf convention, a few hours before my Brookline gig, and admission is free:

https://schedule.boskone.org/62/

The rest of the tour (including a virtual event with Yanis Varoufakis on the 15th) is here, and more dates (New Zealand, possibly Pittsburgh and Atlanta) are being added all the time:

https://craphound.com/novels/redteamblues/2025/02/06/announcing-the-picks-and-shovels-book-tour/

Of course, even as I scramble to get ready to hit the road for months, I'm regrettably forced to give some rent-free space in my head to Elon Fucking Musk. This week, I wrote about DOGE as a government-scale private-equity style plundering of the nation:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/07/broccoli-hair-brownshirts/#shameless

But that was before I read Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman's Lawfare article about how Musk's seizure of payment chokepoints will allow him (and Trump) to surveil the entire economy and wield unilateral, unaccountable power:

https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/elon-musk-weaponizes-the-government

In 2023, Farrell and Newman published an important book called Underground Empire, explaining how, during the War on Terror, GWB (and then Obama) weaponized global payment processing systems (most notably SWIFT) and other boring, technical systems, and then used them to wield enormous power around the world:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/10/weaponized-interdependence/#the-other-swifties

Farrell and Newman's point isn't merely that this power was used unwisely or cruelly, but also that the co-opted systems had an actual, useful, important job to do – a job that was only possible if these systems were widely viewed as credibly neutral and apolitical. The book ends with a sobering message about the chaos on the horizon if (when) other countries walk away from these system, leaving infrastructure vacuums in their wake. In their new Lawfare piece, Farrell and Newman imply not just that Musk and Trump are fashioning a powerful weapon out of the nation's digital infrastructure, but also that this could permanently undermine the vital national systems they're seizing control over, with no obvious candidates to replace them.

Meanwhile, the Democrats are still trying to find their asses with both hands, even as voters across the nation bombard them with demands to actually do something. I'm gonna call my senators and rep right after I finish this and remind them that when South Korea's autocratic president attempted a coup, lawmakers stormed the capital, leaping the fences while livestreaming to voters:

https://www.axios.com/2025/02/06/democrats-congress-trump-musk-doge-calls

But not everyone is taking Musk's bullshit lying down. The AFL-CIO has led a coalition of unions in suing DOGE:

https://gizmodo.com/americas-unions-sue-doge-launch-the-department-of-people-who-work-for-a-living-2000559998

And they've launched a counterinitiative with the delightful name of "The Department of People Who Work for a Living":

https://deptofpeoplewhowork.org/

It's nice to see some inside/outside strategy underway. After all, Musk is cruel and disgusting, but he – and the lawyers and creeps who back him – are also very, very stupid, and they're fucking up all over the place.

Take shutting down the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the agency charged with defending America from financial predators (e.g. would-be usurers hoping to turn their social media sites into payment processing platforms). Under Biden's CFPB chief Rohit Chopra, the Bureau was an absolute powerhouse, adopting rules, investigating scammers, and punishing wrongdoers, all in service to the American people:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/07/26/taanstafl/#stay-hungry

So naturally Musk and Trump have shut down the Bureau. But, as Adam Levitin writes for Credit Slips, this was a profoundly stupid move. You see, under Dodd-Frank – the post-2008 financial crisis law that created the CFPB – state attorneys general are empowered to enforce its rules. Those rules can't be amended or rescinded for so long as the CFPB is in a coma. What's more, any "violation of an enumerated consumer law is a violation of the Consumer Financial Protection Act," which can be gone after by state AGs. Another thing: the Truth in Lending Act has a threshold for small loans, below which the Act doesn't apply. The CFPB is supposed to adjust that threshold for inflation, but without a CFPB, that threshold will be frozen in amber like the federal minimum wage, bringing every-larger constellations of financial activity within scope for AG enforcement in any or every state in the Union. Also: none of this can be changed without a 60-vote Senate majority. Nice one, Elon:

https://www.creditslips.org/creditslips/2025/02/shutting-down-cfpb-is-not-like-shutting-down-usaid.html

That isn't the only way that Trump shot himself in the dick last week. As Luke Savage writes, threatening to put tariffs on Canadian goods (and to annex Canada and make it the 51st state) had a profound effect on Canadian politics:

https://www.lukewsavage.com/p/all-bets-are-off

Before last week, Justin Trudeau's political legacy seemed assured. His many leadership failures, along with a billionaire-funded dark-money hate-machine that targeted him with culture-war nonsense and climate denial all added up to record low approval ratings. It was so bad that Trudeau actually sent Parliament home (recklessly leaving Canada without a legislature on the eve of Trump's presidency) and resigned as Liberal Party leader.

A week ago, pretty much everyone in Canada figured that the Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre was about to romp to victory with a Ba'ath-style Parliamentary majority. Poilievre was and is an extraordinarily weak candidate, a guy who has literally never had a job except for "politician," who nevertheless ran as a political outsider, leading a coalition of racists, climate exterminationists, xenophobes, forced-birth militants, and other cryptofascists and low-tax brain-worm victims. The threat of a Poilievre government with a commanding majority was frankly terrifying. Think of him as someone with Trump's agenda and Mitch McConnell's ruthless administrative competence. Trump is bad enough – but smart Trump? Nightmare.

Then came the Trump tariffs and the annexation threats, and overnight, the Tories' 20-point lead narrowed to a two-point lead, which continues to shrink. Poilievre's brand boils down to "Make Canada America Again" – dismantle medicare, smash unions, punish immigrants, ban abortion. With Canadians booing the American anthem at NFL and NBA games and Quebecois demonstrators waving maple-leaf flags, this is not a good time to be running as the America guy.

Don't get me wrong. Trudeau is terrible. Bill Clinton terrible, say. But Poilievre? A fucking monster. Canada's political future may just have been rescued by Trump's big, stupid mouth. Thanks, eh?

Meanwhile, south of the border, our American cousins keep getting fed into the corporate woodchipper. It's been just over a year since Mainers went to the polls and voted in a Right to Repair law with an 83% majority. But a year later, the law is foundering, amid a corporate legal blitz led by the automakers, who have also put Massachusetts' massive popular 2020 Right to Repair law on ice with endless lawfare. :

https://www.techdirt.com/2025/02/07/automakers-sue-to-kill-maines-hugely-popular-right-to-repair-law/

This is the status quo in America. As a highly influential, widely cited 2014 peer-reviewed study found:

economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-politics/article/testing-theories-of-american-politics-elites-interest-groups-and-average-citizens/62327F513959D0A304D4893B382B992B

In other words, the only time the American people get what they demand is when giant corporations and oligarchs want it too. But when the plutes want something that the people despise, they almost always get their way.

Speaking of which, how's things going with Uber?

This week, Hubert Horan, the aviation industry analyst whose writings on Uber are the most important analysis of the company's business, investor scams, wage theft, and lobbying, published his long-awaited 34th research note on the company:

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2025/02/hubert-horan-can-uber-ever-deliver-part-thirty-four-tony-wests-calamitous-legacy-at-uber-and-with-the-kamala-harris-campaign.html

This edition is devoted to Tony West, Uber's Chief Legal Officer, and also brother-in-law to Kamala Harris, as well as manager of her disastrous failure of a 2024 election campaign. West may have run a Democratic presidential campaign, but he epitomizes the corporate corruption that gave rise to Trump. As Horan writes, West's first major accomplishment at Uber was to get the company exonerated for intimidating customers who were raped by Uber drivers. But his obituary will lead with the fact that he got Prop 22 passed in Calfornia, legalizing Uber's worker misclassification gambit, which allows the company to pay well below minimum wage and evade all workplace protection laws.

It was West who tapped Silicon Valley's tech oligarchs for large-dollar donations to the Harris campaign, which presumably played a substantial role in Harri's unwillingness to take a tough line on Big Tech while on the trail, creating the (correct) impression among voters that Harris would stand up for big business over their own interests.

It's an important read, and it's a reminder that the Democrats lost the last election every bit as much as Trump won it, and that their paralysis in the face of a national crisis is absolutely in character for the Democratic Party.

But on the other hand, the antitrust surge in the US, UK, EU, Canada, Australia, France, Germany, and China (!) over the past five years are all the more remarkable and heartening in light of the dismal and corrupt state of world governments. After all, there is no billionaire-backed dark money lobby whipping up support for smashing corporate power. The antitrust victories of the 2020s marked a turning point – the first time in my memory when extremely popular policies that the wealthy hated triumphed.

Decapitating the agencies that made those policies won't change the enormous political rage that led to the antitrust surge. If anything, it will only feed it. Enforcers like Rohit Chopra, Lina Khan and Jonathan Kanter did brilliant, important work – but they were only able to do it because of us. They're out of office, but we're still here. Don't ever forget that.

I certainly won't. This week, I turned in the edited manuscript for my next book, a nonfiction title called Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What To Do About It, which Farrar, Straus and Giroux will publish next October:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/

The day I turned it in Ars Technica ran a huge package called "As Internet enshittification marches on, here are some of the worst offenders," reeling off the most disgusting high-tech ripoffs trying to worm their way into your home and wallet:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/02/as-internet-enshittification-marches-on-here-are-some-of-the-worst-offenders/

This sparked an epic Reddit thread on r/NoStupidQuestions:

https://www.reddit.com/r/NoStupidQuestions/comments/1ij42yh/what_are_some_other_examples_of_enshittification/

I love to see how giving a name and a description to this phenomenon has captured and directed some of that rage. And for the record, it doesn't bother me at all that some of these people are using "enshittification" to mean "corporations fucking shit up" without regard to my formal definition of the process. As I wrote last October:

Many people apply the term "enshittification" very loosely indeed, to mean "something that is bad," without bothering to learn – or apply – the theoretical framework. This is good. This is what it means for a term to enter the lexicon: it takes on a life of its own. If 10,000,000 people use "enshittification" loosely and inspire 10% of their number to look up the longer, more theoretical work I've done on it, that is one million normies who have been sucked into a discourse that used to live exclusively in the world of the most wonkish and obscure practitioners. The only way to maintain a precise, theoretically grounded use of a term is to confine its usage to a small group of largely irrelevant insiders. Policing the use of "enshittification" is worse than a self-limiting move – it would be a self-inflicted wound.

And also: there's a lot of stuff that's just shitty right now, which is one of the reasons my word's putting up such great numbers. People are getting fed up with it, in ways large…and small. Take the post-pandemic trend of using your phone in speaker-mode in public places. I'm a prison abolitionist, but I'll make an exception for people who do this. Display 'em in stocks. Chain 'em up by their wrists. Or, you know, do what they do in France: fine them €150 for using a speakerphone on the train:

https://www.thelocal.fr/20250206/french-train-passenger-fined-e150-for-using-phone-on-speaker

Speaking of gruesome tortures, the essential Long Forgotten blog has posted its extensive, thoughtful review of the changes to Disneyland's Haunted Mansion. Very few people can write about built environment entertainment like Long Forgotten (the only other person who comes to mind is the excellent Foxx Nolte). Long Forgotten's verdict is "mostly good, but man, that new gift shop *suuuuucks:

https://longforgottenhauntedmansion.blogspot.com/2025/02/beyond-bride-other-changes-in-2025.html

OK, it's time for me to go and make my packing list for the tour. I'm going to leave you with a song. Last night, my pal Cynthia Hathaway turned me on to the Shotgun Jazz band, led by trumpeter/frontwoman Maria Dixon. If you like Louis Prima-style shout-singing, you'll love 'em – I bought everything they had on Bandcamp this morning:

https://www.shotgunjazzband.com/

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/08/commixture/#petardhoists

Image: i ♥ happy!! (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Messy_storage_room_with_boxes.jpg

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

[m-accost]

The mutation of the phrase "reply-guy" from simp-who-regularly-replies-to-the-woman-he-simps-for to the more generic guy-who-regularly-replies-to-a-larger-account is a very nice example of semantic-drift. In a few short years the original meaning was gutted, and now a petty humblebrag wears its skin

[nerves-nebula]

Wait before I go to bed, I have a burning question:

Is there a word for how the word “what” used to be used in the past? (And is maybe still used in some places idk I’m not sure)

Obviously, there’s more out of date phrases like “give them what for!” but there’s also stuff like saying “what” when you mean “which” or “who” or “that”

Fir example: “that’s the guy what stole my shoes” or “that’s the soup what my mom made” or “those are the flowers what attracted bees”

I definitely saw this a lot more in the old TV shows I watched growing up, but I’ve noticed myself incorporating it into the way I type a lot recently and I’m dying to know what it’s called so that I can actually know if I’m doing it properly instead of just repeating what I remember from TV as a kid

[flock-of-cassowaries]

Happy Pride, everyone!!!

[english-lessons-bolzano]

SEMANTIC CHANGES IN ENGLISH

Awful – Literally "full of awe", originally meant "inspiring wonder (or fear)", hence "impressive". In contemporary usage, the word means "extremely bad".

Awesome – Literally "awe-inducing", originally meant "inspiring wonder (or fear)", hence "impressive". In contemporary usage, the word means "extremely good".

Terrible – Originally meant "inspiring terror", shifted to indicate anything spectacular, then to something spectacularly bad.

Terrific – Originally meant "inspiring terror", shifted to indicate anything spectacular, then to something spectacularly good.[1]

Nice – Originally meant "foolish, ignorant, frivolous, senseless". from Old French nice (12c.) meaning "careless, clumsy; weak; poor, needy; simple, stupid, silly, foolish", from Latin nescius ("ignorant or unaware"). Literally "not-knowing", from ne- "not" (from PIE root *ne- "not") + stem of scire "to know" (compare with science). "The sense development has been extraordinary, even for an adj". [Weekley] -- from "timid, faint-hearted" (pre-1300); to "fussy, fastidious" (late 14c.); to "dainty, delicate" (c. 1400); to "precise, careful" (1500s, preserved in such terms as a nice distinction and nice and early); to "agreeable, delightful" (1769); to "kind, thoughtful" (1830).

Naïf or Naïve – Initially meant "natural, primitive, or native" . From French naïf, literally "native", the masculine form of the French word, but used in English without reference to gender. As a noun, "natural, artless, naive person", first attested 1893, from French, where Old French naif also meant "native inhabitant; simpleton, natural fool".

Demagogue – Originally meant "a popular leader". It is from the Greek dēmagōgós "leader of the people", from dēmos "people" + agōgós "leading, guiding". Now the word has strong connotations of a politician who panders to emotions and prejudice.

Egregious – Originally described something that was remarkably good (as in Theorema Egregium). The word is from the Latin egregius "illustrious, select", literally, "standing out from the flock", which is from ex—"out of" + greg—(grex) "flock". Now it means something that is remarkably bad or flagrant.

Gay – Originally meant (13th century) "lighthearted", "joyous" or (14th century) "bright and showy", it also came to mean "happy"; it acquired connotations of immorality as early as 1637, either sexual e.g., gay woman "prostitute", gay man "womaniser", gay house "brothel", or otherwise, e.g., gay dog "over-indulgent man" and gay deceiver "deceitful and lecherous". In the United States by 1897 the expression gay cat referred to a hobo, especially a younger hobo in the company of an older one; by 1935, it was used in prison slang for a homosexual boy; and by 1951, and clipped to gay, referred to homosexuals. George Chauncey, in his book Gay New York, would put this shift as early as the late 19th century among a certain "in crowd", knowledgeable of gay night-life. In the modern day, it is most often used to refer to homosexuals, at first among themselves and then in society at large, with a neutral connotation; or as a derogatory synonym for "silly", "dumb", or "boring".[2]

Guy – Guy Fawkes was the alleged leader of a plot to blow up the English Houses of Parliament on 5 November 1605. The day was made a holiday, Guy Fawkes Day, commemorated by parading and burning a ragged manikin of Fawkes, known as a Guy. This led to the use of the word guy as a term for any "person of grotesque appearance" and then by the late 1800s—especially in the United States—for "any man", as in, e.g., "Some guy called for you". Over the 20th century, guy has replaced fellow in the U.S., and, under the influence of American popular culture, has been gradually replacing fellow, bloke, chap and other such words throughout the rest of the English-speaking world. In the plural, it can refer to a mixture of genders (e.g., "Come on, you guys!" could be directed to a group of mixed gender instead of only men).

Silvio Pasqualini Bolzano inglese ripetizioni English insegnante teacher

[super-wario-gunshine]

Very funny to me that to a Gen X person, the phrase "I'll be out of pocket for a bit but we'll hook up later," means, "I'll be unavailable for a bit but we'll meet up later." But to a Gen Z person it means, "I'll be acting crazy for a bit but we'll fuck later."

[cynosurus]

My pride month hobby:

Read every mention of the words queer and gay in old books like Agatha Christie and LOTR with the sexuality and gender meaning.

[chrome-bones]

Fun semantic drift+morphological derivation spotted in Kanien’kéha (Mohawk)

I was doing my weekly homework for Kanien’kéha and several of these included the verb -noronhkhw- meaning to love someone (for example 'I love you' would be konnorónhkhwa’ /ɡũ.no.ˈɽu��́h.khwa/) which I knew was derived from the verb/adjective (same thing in Mohawk) -noron- meaning for something to be precious / rare / valuable (kanó:ron /ɡa.nǒː.ɽũ/ 'it is precious', ka’serehtanó:ron /ɡaʔ.se.ɽeh.tanǒː.ɽũ/ 'it is a rare car') plus the instrumental affix -hkw- (though it seems more like a causative to me), which from my understanding turns a verb/adjective into a transitive noun requiring a patient and changing the meaning to reflect this. In this case essentially meaning something something like Agent makes Patient precious, or Patient is made precious to Agent, which is where you get the sense of loving someone.

Now this is already a very fun morphological derivation but I decided to check Julian Charles' A History of the Iroquoian Languages for a potential etymology for -noron- and found this

Originally in Proto Iroquoian it's reconstructed as having a meaning relating to difficulty or failure and then secondarily developing a meaning relating to being valuable in later North-Iroquoian languages, though only Mohawk seems to have lost that original meaning entirely. Just thought that was a fun semantic drift that I never would've thought of before, as well a cool example of Kanien’kéha's very fun morphology.

[mapswithoutwyoming]

A great example of descriptivist vs prescriptivist linguistics: Apparently titular “actually” means nominal, but fuck that, nominal already means nominal, we don’t need another word for that. “Referred to in the title” is a much more practical thing for titular to mean, and the only one I’ve ever heard it used for.

[flock-of-cassowaries]

I’m sorry, Uncle Roger, but what the fuck?

[sentientsky]

guess who’s been wading thru the archives again

[pooslie]

ok but this?:

When you say someone is being pretentious about what they write or art or do, what you’re actually saying is: some people can strive for literary/artistic/intellectual merit and meaningfulness, but this person can’t.

in my life experience i have ONLY ever heard pretentious used to describe the person who is doing the judging on the writer/artist/etc. not to describe the person themself?

ie: if PersonA says "PersonB does Yz? That's low-class/cringe/immature/ect." then PersonA would be described as pretentious NOT PersonB

and reading it used this other way (and then looking it up on Merriam Webster and seeing that they agree??) feels, to me, like semantic drift?

what's your opinion on like being too pretentious?

you think oscar wilde’s gucci floral suit wearing angel ass spent his last gay breath making a witty remark about the wallpaper so that we could all live like a bunch of repressed 16th century puritans? are those glisteningly fresh rose petals going to throw themselves all over your scarlet chaise lounge and fake fur duvet? is that first edition of albert camus you bought at a thrift shop in paris going to lovingly read itself? y'all are really out there saying god gave us the ability to order cinnamon cappuccinos and buy herringbone tweed blazers and recite ovid to our friends only so we could not do those things? as it is with all paths in life, so long as you’re self-aware and not bothering or hurting anyone, you go ahead and be as pretentious as you want! it’s so much fun!!

[cynosurus]

I just wish though that English had drifted semantically in the same way as Swedish so I could say in English "sorry but I have a cold so we shouldn't meet today, I don't want to smite you".

[tswwwit]

Hello to the best author ever!!!! Familiar au has had me in a death grip for years. I will never stop re reading and overanalyzing this work of art. 😘

I'm having thoughts about familiar Bill having the same history as canon Bill. Doesn't that mean Bill isn't a demon? Hold on, I'm donning my conspiracy theory hat.

What is a demon in familiar au anyway? Just a general term humans made up to classify any evil being of unknown origins? My head canon is that a demon is an entity that manifested in the nightmare realm. I feel like that matches best with familiar au lore so far.

Canon Bill and his Hechmanics are a group of interdimensional criminals from different dimensions. Bill spending "eons amassing criminals and lunatics from different dimensions" is a direct fact from Alex. Another fun fact! Hectorgon used to be sheriff of the interdimensional task force meant to take Bill down. So they aren't evil because they're demons. They're just like that (and we accept them for who they are ♥️).

So is familiar Bill even a demon? Are his Hechmanics demons? Did everyone just assume they were demons and they never bothered to correct them? Or are they lying about it? How much of canon is in familiar au?

Did Bill forget he isn't even a demon??? Did he forget just how "human" he actually was before meeting Dipper? A trillion years is a long time to Stockholm Syndrome yourself.

Okay but it would be so funny if my theory was correct. Dipper thought his familiar being a demon was bad enough but he doesn't know he's a Mafia wife on the interdimensional scale oh nooooo

I believe Bill in canon is technically still a 'demon', in that he's described as such and never really denies it? But details aside - I've never really defined what a 'demon' is in Familiar AU - and I'm glad, because I started it waaaay before we got all that supplemental canonical material!

Familiar Bill didn't manifest out of nowhere like the classical idea of 'demon'. He had parents, and the backstory, and all that!

But I would say that Familiar Bill is a demon. In that it's a catchall term for Very Magical Powerful Malevolent Being from Another Dimension.

And in this particular branch of the multiverse, well. Let's use Bill's incredibly old age for this bit of worldbuilding.

Say you've been hanging with interdimensional criminals since a billion years back. Turns out that when nasty customers hang out in certain places, beings of similar nature and intent tend move into the general area. It's the part of the universe the 'good guys' of the universe avoid, making it all the more tempting for all kinds of weirdos and monsters to gather around! A few hundred thousand years later and before you know it, the whole thing snowballs! A little spectrum of nasty little monsters with powers, fluttering in the same neighborhood. Not all of them are immortal though, and it turns out if those stick around in the same-ish place for long enough - that being millennia - the mortal ones'll develop their own culture and amalgamated language.

Familiar Bill: Confirmed for Demon, as he's Enculturated enough over a billion years to consider himself one.

[teh-nos]

but kids. kids. listen.

if you don't use 'drabble' to mean exactly 100 words then you can't call things half drabbles and double drabbles and triple drabbles and quadrodrabbles and pentadrabbles and hexadrabbles and whatever the fuck else you feel like inventing.

is that not worth it? IS IT NOT?

[infirmux]

for the last few minutes i have been watching a great movement of dark birds...οἰωνοί or οἰωνοί...?