Mechanismatic

Or Linda Hamilton’s in Terminator 2, except literally.

Ever seen The Prestige?

This is one of those “technically true, but missing the bigger picture” pedantic gotchas.

Yes, Hercules is the Roman name not the Greek name. Yes, barbarian as a term originally meant not-Greek or not-Greek-enough for some Greeks.

But it’s not like you’re going for full historical accuracy already (or even could if you wanted to). It’s just a subjective scale of how accurate do you want to be in what ways that you think are important.

You’re not going to speak ancient or koine Greek when playing the game. You’re playing game rules that aren’t based solely on Greek mythological cosmology. Barbarian isn’t a term in DnD for non-Greeks the same way chai tea in English doesn’t mean “tea tea,” but rather “a spiced Indian tea.” Words have multiple meanings. Those meanings can change over time. Those words can have a different meaning in a different language even if adopted from the same source.

“I don’t want to belong to any club that would accept me as one of its members.”

But, you’re just one person. You won’t be present for 99.9999%+ of newer usages of terms, so you’ll be impotent to effect much change on the matter. With the level of illiteracy and the anti-intellectualism that seems rampant these days, even having a widely read column on a popular platform might be insufficient to turn such a tide. Maybe at best you’d be a screenwriter for a Hollywood blockbuster that a decent portion of the population watches and you could hope for the best, but even that seems weak considering we collectively don’t even remember movie lines accurately ten or twenty years later.

You should literally literally when a literally flies straight for your face because those feathered fowl can be as aggressive as gooses.

But the disputes occur because people use the newer, less common meaning until it becomes more common. If you discourage people from using the word “incorrectly” but it eventually evolves in meaning through usage because people ignore your encouragement to return to the original meaning, then you’d just be on the losing side of the battle historically.

I feel like it should be much more nuanced as to whether you encourage or discourage change. People reclaiming or usurping derogatory terms as a big FU to bigotry? Awesome. People twisting words for the purposes of oppressive, deceptive, or marketing purposes? Nope.

The reason behind the change should be preferably be intentional, backed by goodwill, and done in order to increase ease of communication because the old meaning/usage wasn’t sufficient.

But language is a shared medium and a lot of intention falls by the wayside because of random quirks as much by intentional campaigns.

This is where marketing creates special kinds of linguistic nightmares. Effectively, marketing is bullshit that becomes standard usage because it’s so pervasive and people unfamiliar with the field don’t know any better.

Hence LLMs are called AI. Two wheeled electric fire hazards are called hoverboards. 3G, 4G, 4G LTE, 5G, cell services usually aren’t up to the standards they claim.

Les Québécois sont entrés dans la conversation.

Seems like a variant of hypercorrection.

Yeah, I’m prone to go down rabbit holes looking at the etymology and origin of related words for hours. Latin was one of my favorite classes in high school. It’s great for world building and stylizing prose when writing fiction.

Sometimes the etymology is just weird because the current meaning is from an abbreviation of a phrase and the roots don’t make sense in isolation, such as perfidious, from the roots per fidem “through faith” but its meaning is from the larger phrase “deceiving through faith.”

My usual example is manufacture — to make by hand, but it’s more commonly used now to mean machine manufactured and made by hand is called handmade.

This was one of my bad jokes at the ren faire. I’d walk up to other people with staves and say, “so, you’re also here for the staff meeting?”

All the good dungeon real estate got bought up by early adventurers with their collected loot, so now they are located in gated communities or expensive adventuring resorts. Everyone else gets the roadside discount dungeon experience with plastic monster chotchkes for loot drops and pugs and chihuahuas dressed up in skeleton and dragon costumes.

But which one? Zombie killer, scifi vampire, perfect alien, blood queen, monster hunter?

You throw water on the fiery plane when you land at the airport.

But seriously, I would imagine the hangar would need to be constructed of a material that was neutral or resistant to the elements, maybe even composed of them altogether to have immunity to destruction by them. So a prismatic hangar that has all elemental resistances. Or you could go with a fifth element like aether. Or heart if you’re playing the Captain Planet RPG. Or Milla Jovovich.

I feel like this is too general. I’d want to customize based on specific IRL traits or jobs or hobbies.

You feed and befriend crows? Druid with animal skills focus.

You’re some kind of a carpenter, engineer, craftsman? Artificer.

Phlebotomist’s assistant? Vampire thrall backstory.

Retail salesperson? Bard with psychic damage skills.

Live in a basement? Homebrew troll obviously.

Software and coding? Sounds like arcane languages and warlock pacts to me.

I would guess someone invented the handshake in prehistoric times and we just have no medium in which a record could exist aside from an undiscovered cave drawing or something like that. Humans seem to naturally touch hands outside of any social influence or cultural history. Babies reach out and people touch their hands. It seems like a pretty intuitive human action. We touch things with our hands, so other hands seems natural as a thing to touch. The shake just seems like a minor variation on that.

Mitchell and Webb had a great sketch about that.

https://youtu.be/P6MOnehCOUw