- Chat, are you hearing this rig Words with common, generally agreed upon meanings are changing as we speak.

Think about it.

Is the way that you use the word chat, content, or even cloud different fro how you use it a few years ago?

And did you even notice it happe This type of language evolution, where the meanings of words shift over time, sometimes even leaving their original meaning behind, is called semantic change.

There are probably words in your vocabulary that future generations will use in completely different ways.

And the weirdest part, it's kind of your fault.

I'm Dr.

Erica Brozovsky, and this is "Otherwords."

(bright music) - Otherwords.

- One way that the meaning of a word changes is by broadening the objects or that the word can refer to.

Take chat as an example.

As early as the 1400s, it meant frivolous or trivial co before broadening to mean all kinds of informal and friendly conversation.

As that conversation moved online to message boards and instant messaging apps, chat started to refer to the digital spaces where chatting took place, like the text box next to a live And it was streamers who broaden to mean not just the text box, but the people using it.

Thanks to them, chat can no mean the audience participating in online discourse, not just what they're doing, but who they are.

- Chat, is this real?

- Linguists call thi broadening semantic extension.

Its opposite, semantic reduction occurs when a word narrows to refer to fewer things than be So back in the late middle ages, the word girl could be used for children of all genders.

The word deer meant any four-legged animal.

And apple was used for a whole bunch of different fruits.

Over time, they shifted to only mean female children, Bambi and friends, and fruits of the genus Malus.

So what semantic reduction is ha in our language right now?

Maybe it's the word content, which has historically been used for anything contained in anothe The contents of a jar or the table of contents in a book.

But when you hear the word conte you might think of something much more specific, a piece of media posted online.

As this association strengthens, our future selves might think it that we once used the word to talk about book chapters and ♪ I made you some content ♪ - So words can change to mea something broader or narrower, but they can change in other dimensions too, like getting stronger or softer.

Words like decimate and catastro didn't used to be so disastrous.

Decimate originated in ancient R initially meaning to destroy one-tenth of something.

But now when we use it, we're trying to indicate total destruction.

A catastrophe was in centuries past the final act of a play before it sharpened to mean misfortune and disaster through the process of semantic intensification.

Semantic bleaching on the other makes words softer and more subt It's how awesome went from absolutely astonishing to pretty cool.

But in our lifetimes, we bleached the words literally, which gets used to mea seriously rather than precisely, and bestie, which can mean a best friend or just a friend or even sometimes a stranger.

But one of the mos knee-slappingly hilarious exampl of linguistic bleaching is the discourse marker LOL.

Once an acronym for laughing out we now use those letters for anything mildly funny or even just to indicate a frien or sarcastic tone through text.

What about making a word meaner or nicer over time?

Famously, nice used to mean ignorant or foolish back in the 14th century before semantic elevation, also known as semantic ameliorat polished up the word to refe to something pleasant or good.

We see this process happen in slang all the time.

Words like bad, sick, savage have all been elevated to mean attractive, cool, and bo But many semantic elevations survive the slang cycle and keep their positive associations long-term.

Take hack.

It can be a verb meaning to chop away at something or a noun meaning a terrible cou or a person who is bad at their - I mean, the last thing on earth I want to do is move to the desert to write some lame jokes for an old hack.

- But in the 1950s, students at MIT started using the word hack to describe tinkering with machi After graduating, some o those students got jobs working with a relatively new machine, c The word spread through the tech elevating hack to describe clever programming workaround, and that broadened to describe any kind of useful w Now a life hack is something that makes your day a little eas not something that chops it to b Semantic perjoration has the opposite effect.

A recent example is basic, which still means essential or fundamental, as in let's get back to basics.

But semantic perjoration is giving it a newer, more derogatory meaning.

A basic fact may be a simple concept you can build upon, but a basic person is boring and unoriginal.

In it's newer usage, you d not want to get back to basics.

You want to get far away from th - Ya basic!

- All the types of semantic change we've covered so far involve stretching or squeezing to forge new understandings of t but this semantic shape shifting isn't the only way to make new meaning.

Sometimes all it takes is a bit of creative borrowing.

Metaphor, our old friend from English class, drives language change whe we take words from one context and apply it to a similar one.

When we developed the technology to store our data outside of our own devices and instead upload it to remote data centers, it kind of felt like all that in was floating through the air.

So instead of someone else's ser we use the metaphor, the cloud.

- And we're going to move the di the center of your digital life, into the cloud.

- In another metaphor-driven semantic change, someone who ghosts you isn't a spiritual apparition, but they are similarly hard to s Metonymy is when a word that's a or associated with a meaning gets substituted for the meaning like when news stories say the W to refer to the whol executive branch of government that's headquartered there, or Hollywood to refer to the movie industry and not just the Los Angeles nei associated with it.

As home internet connections rose in the '90s, we started to use unplugged to refer to getting offline enti not just as connecting a power cord from an outlet.

All of these types of semantic change get mashed up and remixed all the time.

For instance, semanti extension and semantic elevation are both being applied to the wo The original meaning of spontaneity and playfulness can now describe a generational yearning for authenticity, freedom, and counter-cultural independence.

Whimsy's part of speech also seems to be shifting.

It used to be exclusively noun, as in a sense of whimsy, with the adjective form being wh but perhaps because it shares an with other adjectives like happy and bossy, some young people use whimsy as an adjective itself, as in, "He's so whimsy."

Combine intensification, perjora and sprinkle in a little bit of and you get cooked as in, "Chat, are we cooked?"

This usage calls to mind the process of feeling the heat or getting burned to othe metaphors for facing adversity, but it's also an example o intensification and perjoration.

You're cooked when things are go like really, really badly.

Now the word can both mean my food's finished and I'm finished.

With all of these processes bumping up against each other every time we communicate, it's no wonder that language is always changing, first in small speec communities and then larger ones until the change is so ubiquitou we forget we didn't always use these words this way.

You're probably making new meani with the people you talk to righ So what semantic shifts are you seeing around you?

Let us know, chat.