just thinking out loud

Word meaning change over time.  What used to be a good word now becomes bad as a product of language meaning shift. Similarly, some words with originally negative implication have now turned upside down and are given good meaning like the word nice. Sociolinguistics is such an interesting subject.

During the last centuries names like Daft, Balls, Shufflebottom, Cock among others were not considered funny as they are today.  According to Yahoo News , names like the above mentioned are decreasing in number either by migration or simply changing their names according to Webber, the author of the study. On the contrary, names like Zhang, Wang, and Yang  are increasing by the thousands between 1996 and 2008 as the author researched.

So, what does it mean really? Are people changing names or switching places? Maybe in the next millenium Asians will be inhabiting the Europe and the US and vice versa. Oh, well, I’m just thinking out loud, you see?

Trackback URI | Comments RSS