"Ya know dale..........Natural language change doesn't work that way. There's a Latin example involving repetitions of the string malo.....but no one would have ever spontaneously said it in quotidian speech. You might claim that using the term drive ...... is going to cause confusion, but to the computer and to the computer user the thing...... looks exactly like a hard drive......And nobody's going to be confused........"--Fal
Inevitably the descriptivist defends each and every usage, on the basis of "well, that's just the way a language develops." But the World is full of war, crime, and suffering too. Is it all justified by saying that, well, that's just the way folks are
You seem to defend with equal vehemence the use of "hard drive" to describe a keychain semiconductor random-access memory, for some reason giving me pause so I am wondering if other newly-converted descriptivists in the group might have had the same reaction
[--which I might have called a "keseram"...but thank you for "quotidian", a new one on me, I like it
