[Ads-l] Semantic shift? Or is it me?
Wilson Gray
hwgray at GMAIL.COM
Sun Jul 17 01:49:10 UTC 2022
"... the CIA’s most _secretive_ and powerful hacking tools."
Shouldn't that be, "most _secret_"? I tend to think of _secretive_ as
essentially meaning "sneaky," whereas _secret_ means "unknown." Like, the
point isn't that everybody knows about these tools that the CIA has and
uses in sneaky ways, but that nobody even knew that the tools existed, till
an operative narced on the CIA to WikiLeaks.
This use of "secretive" as a cooler and a goner replacement for "secret"
has been popping up in the last two or three years, at least.
--
- Wilson
-----
All say, "How hard it is that we have to die!"---a strange complaint to
come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
-Mark Twain
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The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
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