i’ve been kind of preoccupied with the notion of words gaining new meanings, or words getting put into a different context – through pop culture. it happens all the time, but what is interesting(moreso annoying) to me is when these new meanings or representations are introduced to/through the internet, and the reappropriation of that word causes havoc on search queries. how can i find more about that sweet spot right after golden hour when the sun is down but the sky isn’t dark yet? heaven forbid i use the word twilight. i can’t search for Tweet related things without inadvertently getting results about twitter. and i definitely can’t find pictures of ACTUAL Madagascar – instead i’ll get that damned dreamworks movie, which i haven’t even seen! it’s a mess!
oxford university press might liken these as new words, but i think there should be a more developed term for this phenomenon – which is very much a new school idea. at first i thought that it could be grouped with skunked terms, but that’s a bit too vocabularily focused: it’s more about actual word definitions taking on new meaning, and not about words being borrowed(borrowed? more like taken over) for movie titles, musician names, internet companies, etc. i’d say that neologisms come closest, especially with the evolution of note, but as i said before the words im talking about are borrowed, not newly coined. hmmm indeed.
At this point, we need to take this into our own hands and find/arrange Latin/Greek words.