24 August 2024

"Semantic bleaching" explained

Merriam-Webster defines "semantic bleaching" as a reduction of a word's intensity (or specificity).  The linked article illustrates the concept using the familiar change in usage of "literally."  I encountered the phrase today in a Guardian article - 
Around this time last year, rawdogging – originally slang for sex without a condom – wasn’t the sort of word you would hear in polite conversation or find in the pages of the Guardian and the BBC. Now, it’s everywhere and being used, largely by gen Z, for the most innocuous situations. Drink black coffee? You’re rawdogging caffeine! Don’t drink coffee at all? You’re rawdogging your mornings! Just finished a nine-hour flight with no entertainment but the flight map? Bro, you rawdogged travel!

The trend for rawdogging flights, which started getting attention earlier this summer, has propelled the term into the mainstream. But the word has been used in nonsexual contexts for several years and, over that time, undergone the early stages of “semantic bleaching”. Its obscene origins have been diluted and for a lot of people it’s no longer remotely scandalous; it just means doing something without assistance.
Language changes with time.  Prescriptivists are doomed.

AddendumThe Atlantic just published an article about young men "rawdogging" activities:
Rawdoggers, according to the dubious lore of social-media virality, overcome the longest of long-haul flights (New York to Hong Kong, say, or London to Sydney) by means of nihilism. They claim to spend the entire journey, perhaps as many as 18 hours, doing nothing other than staring at the flight map on the seat-back screen—no movies, no books, and, for the rawdoggiest, not even any meals...

The practice evolved from the broader rise of asceticism, especially among (young, very online) men. To be alive on Earth these days is to suffer the barrage of constant lures—sex, substance, gambling, sloth—so widely available and easily accessed that one must fight constantly to avoid their seduction... It is about living raw in some ideal, natural state unsullied by cultural decline. And that has always been impossible.
The essay (about rawdoggin, not semantic bleaching) continues at the link.

2 comments:

  1. Other examples include "brainwash", "gaslight", and "trauma."

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  2. Social networks have caused the youth to rawdog vernacular creativity at an exponential clip, for likes. But, the olds being largely oblivious, will go on calling the Joker's henchmen, goons blithely unaware what it's supposed to mean now.

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