What's your opinion on language evolving?

I used to be a purist, preferring to resist words acquiring new meanings, and even more firmly resisting the emergence of new meanings to replace perfectly good existing words.

Not sure what I mean? Well, how about "Biweekly," through decades of misuse, coming to mean both "every two weeks" and "twice a week?"





And what say you to the word "ask" as a hip new consultant-speak synonym for "request?"





While I admit I don't use these words in their new configurations if I'm being thoughtful, I think it's not only pointless to resists, it's counterproductive to go all grammar-nerd on my coworkers when they use words in a nonstandard way. There are two reasons

First, the art of creating new words is an old, respected discipline. Shakespeare made a habit of it, and lexicographers have been appropriating bits of other languages to define foodstuffs, and articles of clothing, and anything else for which Shakespeare failed to sculpt a term.

Second, and as a career technologist I should have internalized this decades ago, we keep inventing things for which there are no terms. For decades, advancements in technology have created a need for new words to describe new things. From radar and lasers to animatronics and nanobots, words keep emerging to meet the newness in our lives.

And what has this to do with poetry? Well, only that contemporary poetry shoudln't be afraid to leverage contemporary language. I've had folks comment on what I thought were pretty mundane words (phone? photon?) that they thought didn't belong in poems. I disagree. We should fill our poems with the language of our lives.

And if our lives involve cybersecurity, then we can talk about the malware our operating systems have to manage.