Research Editors

If your initial reaction to the first two sentences above is to think “Ugh”, you are in good company. They are offensive to the mind. “A new interactive what?” the brain protests.    Increasingly it seems, however, the adjective is the new noun. Things that describe things are now the things themselves. It is not a “blue something”, it’s just a “blue”. But the last sentence does not offend. What was once an adjective has become a noun, but it is accepted. Why is this? Usage leads to acceptance. Linguistic changes depend on usage to survive. Once a phrase is introduced by an innovator, someone else has to adopt it to give it life. The more widely a phrase is used, the stronger its roots in the vernacular. Over time, through constant use, the phrase becomes inoffensive. Adjectives have always become nouns; it’s just that the offensive ones above are new. Changes to language like this can happen stealthily so that we don’t notice. One example is the phrase “thrown under a bus”, ...

It was 18 December 2013. Brexiters were seen as “fruitcakes and loonies” by then UK prime minister David Cameron, Trump was still just a reality TV star with a Twitter account, and one of the last bailouts of the financial crisis had just taken place with the EU handing over EUR10bn to Cyprus. Over in the nascent cryptocurrency world, the price of Bitcoin had dropped from an all-time high of $1,100 to $420, a fall of 62%. This was causing waves in the Bitcoin community.    On the bitcointalk.org message board, a poster called “GameKyuubi” had a little rant about what a terrible trader he was and how the best thing to do was hold through the considerable bear markets Bitcoin experienced. But he’d been drinking, so instead of typing “Hold” he typed “Hodl” in all caps in the subject line: “I AM HODLING” Explaining his logic he said “You only sell in a bear market if you are a good day trader or an illusioned [sic] noob. The people in between hold. In a zero-sum game such as this,...

It is not just commodities such as oil and timber that are subject to inflation. Words are too. Inflation is when the purchasing power of the money we hold falls so with a given amount of currency we can buy less. Words in one sense are like money. Their value fluctuates and the amount of meaning we can ‘buy’ with them rises or falls.   For example, the word “awesome” started life in the 1500s meaning “inspiring awe or dread”. By the 1960s it had a much weaker, colloquial sense of just “very good”. Now in order to express the original meaning, we have to use several words, where just one was sufficient before. This type of semantic shift is known as broadening. Another example is the word “hierarchy”, which used to mean a host of angels, but now means a group of people or things organised into ranks. There is also broadening’s opposite, narrowing, where a word’s meaning becomes more precise, thus strengthens. For example, “meat” used to mean food of any type. This inflation and def...