Just recently I was in a conversation with a number of UK mainlanders and we had a debate over what “tories” meant, apparently disproportionately ordinarily it refers to a political party and it’s not usual to use it as short for “territories” as I’ve used it (according to how the debate ended, it was half and half between them). And once again I’m reminded of how people feel to look back at their usage of a word/phrase over the years and cringe.
More tragically, me and a friend were embarrassed once upon realizing everyone was confusing “encephalitis” with “hydrocephalus” when talking to someone about their kid with hydrocephalus. Awkward because encephalitis is caused by HIV.
The word “literally”. I know what it means, but I blame this on stereotypical mean girls in coming-of-age teen American movies. Also the word “apo-calypse”. I used to say “apoly-capse”.
Yup, meaning of a lot of words with similar meaning gets eroded like that these days. I remember a medium sized twitch streamer one day being inundated by his viewers with subscriptions, follows, gifts, and what not, and he kept saying “you guys are actually insane”. And I kept thinking “what would you say if someone actually insane turned up in your chat?”