We’re getting the language into its final shape—the shape it’s going to have when nobody speaks anything else. When we’ve finished with it, people like you will have to learn it all over again. You think, I dare say, that our chief job is inventing new words. But not a bit of it! We’re destroying words—scores of them, every day. We’re cutting the language down to the bone. The Eleventh Edition won’t contain a single word that will become obsolete before the year 2050.
~ George Orwell, 1984
When you change the meaning of a word (as opposed to extending it or adding a new meaning, although that has problems, too) – you run the risk of either making the word meaningless, or, worse, having no idea of what it’s previous meaning was.
I recall explaining to someone the term “Gay Nineties.” First, that you need to put an “Eighteen” in between; and, second, that it has nothing to do with homosexuals (with the exception of a very few social circles, homosexuals were at the time hiding inside the drawer of the wardrobe that sat in the closet). An aside – at least in my children’s generation, “gay” morphed further into something like “that is SO stupid, it burns” – took me a while to realize what they meant when they tossed out the phrase “That’s so gay!”
“Marriage” is another one. When it (eventually) becomes a word that refers to one, two of whatever kind, or multiples that are somehow emotionally connected – it has no meaning left.
I found a couple computer CDs with .avi video files that ran under dos and Windows 95. While we still have .avi files, they are nothing like those from 95. I did find an old 98 system they would play on, but today’s systems have no idea what to do with them. 😉
Hardware or software?
On the software side did you try Kodi or Media Player Classic?
I have a fair amount of vintage avi’s with no issues.
There’s also plenty of media converters that know to transcode it.
What I have found odd is hardware DVD players that don’t play CDs.
I think the meaninglessness you see in “marriage” has been caused by the divorce rate and people getting into throwaway marriages for whatever reason. Maybe it’s because I’m definitely in the LGBTQ+ camp, but I just can’t see how enabling more people to get legally married in whatever shape or form that marriage takes lessens the meaning of the word “marriage.”
And, FWIW, I don’t think we should go back to the old “one marriage for lifetime” rule either. I certainly wouldn’t have wanted my sister (or her daughter) to be stuck in the abusive marriage she got herself into. I just think getting into the married state should perhaps be a little more rigorous than it is these days. Maybe if some people understood that marriage is as much a responsibility to their partner as it is a privilege they’re given, they’d treat it a little less flippantly.
Marriage, in every culture, has always been about creating a stable environment in which to raise the next generation, and to make sure that there is a commitment on the part of a man to provide and care for A woman, rather than just leaving her to find another partner.
The idea of love was an afterthought, and far different to the sweeping grand notions that exist today about having a soulmate, rather love, if it happened, develops over time, hence the arranged marriages in India.
Also, the term marriage definitely has religious connotation, if people want a word for all the newfangled ways in which people connect these days, they should create one but the word marriage is already taken.
If I may add: civil marriage is a relatively recent development and the primacy of civil marriage even more recent, being a late 20th development. Until then religious marriage was a distinctly different thing from civil marriages, one being reversible and the other less so.
Then government got into the largesse business and marriage became an excuse for vote-buying perks, thereby becoming a key battleground of the culture wars.
Those who see marriage as a civil institution see it as a civil rights issue whereas those who see it as a religious institution (a sacrament for catholics, a rite of passage in judaism, etc) see it as government encroaching on spiritual matters and a violation of freedom of worship, even as a part of an ongoing “war on religion”.
Both camps see it as an all-or-nothing, absolutist matter, with no room for compromise.
The most rational answer I’ve seen, which is probably anathema to both factions, is for government to get out of the marriage business altogether. It’s not as if it has a particularly compelling need to record who sleeps with whom and what rituals a particular religion sees fit to carry out. In fact, in many states marriage requires neither state nor ecclesiastical approval or certificates.
People are considered married if they say they’re married.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common-law_marriage
In that space nobody can be forced to carry out a ceremony or be denied the right to sleep with whatever partner they choose. Everything becomes strictly voluntary and optional and nobody is coerced.
Of course, politicians prefer an active conflict to a peaceful solution, so the war rages on.
He was wrong, changing the meaning of words is a never-ending task for two reasons.
One, it allows you to constantly shift the language to mean what you want it to (and ideas fall into the past as the words are lost/revalued to mean something else.)
Two, you never want an important job to fall into disuse as when you need it again you’ll have to rediscover all the things the old team just ‘knew’.
Case in point, going back to the moon. We’ve done it before, it should be a snap – right? Except we’ll have to start from square one because most of the notes of the time are gone, as are the people that made those notes. I remember reading somewhere that the secrets to designing/building those five huge engines for the first stage will all have to be relearned because all the painstaking notes on them weren’t properly kept/stored – and the people that made them aren’t here to translate them anyway.
Throw in those wishing to change history (like those claiming little things like the moon walks and WWII didn’t really happen) and the lack of a past (or the words for it) can change the future.
The biggest problem with recreating the F1 engine isn’t the plans or even the notes. It’s that the “standard” parts it used don’t exist anymore. In many cases the suppliers don’t exist.
Besides, F1 isn’t needed anymore. Even if we could build new ones we still wouldn’t use it.
Today we know much more about space propulsion and have newer, better engines available. Smaller but more flexible, controllable and, much more importantly: restartable. Remember when the shuttle main engine being restartable and throttleable was bleeding edge tech? These days its common. And the key to propulsive landings.
We wasted 50 years because of IdiotPolitician™ games but we learned a lot despite them. There is a new generation of rocket engineers out there and most are working in the private sector–SPACEX, ORBITAL, BLUE ORIGIN, Rocket Lab–and quietly building a new space age, driven by commercial interest. A more sustainable push than “beat the commies”. Maysayers or revisionists be damned, the engineers go on.
Turns out Heinlein was right: D.D. Harriman wins in the end.
I was just using it as an example. 😉
We see it in the computer world as well. That ‘big’ program that everybody at work uses runs on old gear/OS has to be updated, and the guys/gals that wrote it have long since retired – and the new kids don’t even read the language it was assembled on.
Ha, both in one, when the shuttles’ cockpits were digitized they didn’t replace/upgrade the flight computers or programs, they just stuck on an analog-to-digital interface so the new instruments could talk to the old computers.
You see that latter incremental “improvement” all the time in corporate IT which is where the phrase “keep improving it until it breaks” comes from.
It is also why car companies have common engine specs that endure for decades. GM built 2.5L 4 bangers with the same bore and stroke for over 50 years because the upgrade cycles for the engines and the machinery making the blocks were out of phase so when they designed a new engine they had to use the nearly new machinery and when they bought new machinery it had to service the existing engine design.
It is one reason startups can be more efficient than established businesses; no drag from old systems or products so they can start with the latest best processes.
No tyranny of the installed base.
Incrementalism has its uses but some times the clean sheet approach is best.
In language, an analogy can be found in the difference in “agility” of languages that rely on central authorities to coin acceptable words versus languages that simply recognize the usage of terms as they emerge from the community or from other languages. Academy-ruled languages aren’t terribly fond on neologisms or loan words and end up with entire phrases doing the work of a short and snappy new term.
It can’t be a crime if there’s no word for it. 😉
That’s why people can become defensive over their languages, because they are use to express ideas.
It’s also why the thought of a OneWorld language, to complement our one world government, is so scary because who ever controls the language controls the dialogue.
Essentially, it’s not telling people what to think, it’s teaching people how to think.