[Ads-l] Semantic shift? Or is it me?

[Jonathan Lighter]

True.

Cf. the current mixup between "alternate" and "alternative."

BTW, I was just thinking the other day that it's been too long since I've
come across "(real) gone."

JL

On Sat, Jul 16, 2022 at 9:49 PM Wilson Gray <hwgray at gmail.com> wrote:

> "... 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
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>


-- 
"If the truth is half as bad as I think it is, you can't handle the truth."

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org