Speaking for myself now: I think the overall dynamic you’re pointing at makes sense, and I’d classify the process by which these words get distorted as ‘deceptive’, but whether I think it makes sense to call the use of director ‘lying’ depends on context.
The way you’re framing lies/not-lies feels… too prescriptivist to feel like a robust foundation to me. (I generally do not think language prescriptivism makes sense)
Words change over time. Sometimes they change as part of a deceptive game, sometimes just because a new concept came up and someone grabbed an existing word that was close. Sometimes two languages smash into each other because of trade or conquest.
What counts as lying, and what counts as just using the new definition of a word?
I’d count the first several decades of people misusing ‘literally’ to mean ‘a lot’ as ‘lying, but not deceptive’ (assuming they didn’t expect their listeners to believe them, and understand it as an exaggeration).
I’d count people who literally (lolsad) don’t know what the word ‘literally’ means and start using it to mean “hyperbolic figuratively’ because they’ve only heard the misused version… to not be lying, just using a different word. Which may or may not be bad.
For words like ‘manager’, whose primary role is to describe a social relationship that only really has meaning insofar as we agree on social reality, it feels even less clear cut than literally.
If you begin in world 1, I might describe the first few people to start calling themselves or their employees ‘manager’ as lying. By the time there’s common knowledge that we’re in world 3 I’m not sure that makes sense, if there’s a widely agreed upon new definition of manager that includes ‘promoted person at a particular point in the hierarchy.’ I’m not sure about world 2.
It’s possible, admittedly I don’t expect this to be the case, for the word to have transformed without a lie_raemon ever being told. I think words are almost always pointing to a cluster rather than a concrete thing, even in most technical domains (where the clusters are tighter but rarely perfect).
[edit: I’m not that confident about percentage of techical jargon that is perfectly precise].
So, it seems most useful to me to define lying as ’saying a thing that is outside the current cluster of the word might reasonably mean.
If manager initially means ‘manage a team of people’ and then later means ‘manage some people + get some perks’ and then means ‘only sorta-kinda-manage those people while getting some perks’ and eventually just means ‘get the perks’...
...I think it’s fair to say something distorted and deceptive has happened, but I’m not sure it makes sense to classify any given instance as a lie.
Nod.
Speaking for myself now: I think the overall dynamic you’re pointing at makes sense, and I’d classify the process by which these words get distorted as ‘deceptive’, but whether I think it makes sense to call the use of director ‘lying’ depends on context.
The way you’re framing lies/not-lies feels… too prescriptivist to feel like a robust foundation to me. (I generally do not think language prescriptivism makes sense)
Words change over time. Sometimes they change as part of a deceptive game, sometimes just because a new concept came up and someone grabbed an existing word that was close. Sometimes two languages smash into each other because of trade or conquest.
What counts as lying, and what counts as just using the new definition of a word?
I’d count the first several decades of people misusing ‘literally’ to mean ‘a lot’ as ‘lying, but not deceptive’ (assuming they didn’t expect their listeners to believe them, and understand it as an exaggeration).
I’d count people who literally (lolsad) don’t know what the word ‘literally’ means and start using it to mean “hyperbolic figuratively’ because they’ve only heard the misused version… to not be lying, just using a different word. Which may or may not be bad.
For words like ‘manager’, whose primary role is to describe a social relationship that only really has meaning insofar as we agree on social reality, it feels even less clear cut than literally.
If you begin in world 1, I might describe the first few people to start calling themselves or their employees ‘manager’ as lying. By the time there’s common knowledge that we’re in world 3 I’m not sure that makes sense, if there’s a widely agreed upon new definition of manager that includes ‘promoted person at a particular point in the hierarchy.’ I’m not sure about world 2.
It’s possible, admittedly I don’t expect this to be the case, for the word to have transformed without a lie_raemon ever being told. I think words are almost always pointing to a cluster rather than a concrete thing, even in most technical domains (where the clusters are tighter but rarely perfect).
[edit: I’m not that confident about percentage of techical jargon that is perfectly precise].
So, it seems most useful to me to define lying as ’saying a thing that is outside the current cluster of the word might reasonably mean.
If manager initially means ‘manage a team of people’ and then later means ‘manage some people + get some perks’ and then means ‘only sorta-kinda-manage those people while getting some perks’ and eventually just means ‘get the perks’...
...I think it’s fair to say something distorted and deceptive has happened, but I’m not sure it makes sense to classify any given instance as a lie.