Trademarks and their limits

Posted Feb 9, 2013 23:56 UTC (Sat) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

Why do we accept the judgement over success (or not) from some unspecified "people"?

Because we are humans. Look, you can assign arbitrary meanings to random words all you want but the more you do that the less understandable you become. If there are some widespread meaning assigned to words then it's much better to stop trying to explain that you are right and the whole world is wrong. Even if initially words had other meaning. Think hacker (which now means less of "a person who enjoys exploring the limits of what is possible, in a spirit of playful cleverness" and more of "someone who seeks and exploits weaknesses in a computer system or computer network"). Or addict - who's no longer "a debtor awarded as a slave to his creditor". And we no longer use girl in relation to males (yes, initially it meant a young person of either sex - dictionaries said so just a hundred years ago).

So the right question is not "why do we use terms as perceived by others" but "why would we use terms in some other way" - and I see no reason to do so.