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Voltairina comments on Rationality Quotes March 2012 - Less Wrong
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Absolutely. But if the goal is to establish dominance, as Humpty Dumpty (appears to) suggest, its technique often works.
At first when I posted it I think I was thinking of it as kind of endorsing a pragmatic approach to language usage. I mean, it hurts communication to change the meanings of words without telling anyone, but occasionally it might be useful to update meanings when old ones are no longer useful. It used to be that a "computer" was a professional employed to do calculations, then it became a device to do calculations with, now its a device to do all sorts of things with.
But I feel like that's kind of a dodge - you're absolutely right when you say changing the meanings arbitrarily (or possibly to achieve a weird sense of anthropomorphic dominance over it) harms communication, and should be avoided, unless the value of updating the sense of the word outweighs this.
It's also a useful way to establish a nonweird sense of dominance over my conversational partner.