The Linguist's Unwitting Lie: On the Slow Erosion of Words That Change Their Meaning

I received an email the other day from a reader who had stumbled upon a post I wrote nearly a decade ago about the challenges of modern communication. In it, I’d used the word ‘egregious’ emphatically, describing a particular piece of software design as ‘an egregious failure of empathy’. The reader, a linguist herself, wrote a gentle, almost apologetic note. ‘I know what you meant,’ she said, ‘but the original, almost forgotten meaning of ‘egregious’ is ‘remarkably good’. You were, perhaps unknowingly, praising the very failure you sought to condemn.’

I was floored. Not by the correction—I’m always happy to be corrected—but by the nature of the shift. The word hadn't been used incorrectly in my piece, at least not by contemporary standards. It had simply continued its long, slow slide from meaning ‘standing out from the flock’ (from the Latin *e grege*) to meaning ‘standing out in a bad way’. My page, though technically correct at the time of publication, had become a trap. It now presented a subtle historical artifact as a present-day truth. I was a traveler using a map where the coastline had, over years, imperceptibly shifted.

The Archive of Unspoken Context

This is a different kind of content decay, far more insidious than a broken link or a dated statistic. It’s not that the information is wrong; it’s that the very building blocks of the information—the words themselves—have, in the collective consciousness, been repurposed. The unspoken context that allows language to function has been swapped out from under the text. We talk about keeping facts fresh, but who thinks to update the semantic soil in which those facts are rooted?

To write is to plant a flag in time. We choose our words believing their definitions are solid ground. But language is a living, shifting delta, and the flags we planted on the solid banks of a word’s meaning can find themselves, years later, stranded on a sandbar or even submerged in an entirely new channel. The page is static; the world it describes is not. The most diligent fact-checker might ensure a date is correct or a name is spelled properly, but can they patrol the borders of every word, ensuring its connotations haven’t drifted?

This isn't an argument for pedantry or for constantly re-editing old work to reflect modern usage—that way lies madness and the erasure of a text's own history. Rather, it’s a humbling acknowledgment of a page’s mortality. A piece of writing has a lifespan, not just in its relevance, but in its very legibility. The greatest threat to an older text isn't always that its conclusions have been proven false, but that its language has become a dialect we no longer fully understand, leading us to misread its intentions entirely.

My old post, with its ‘egregious’ error, remains published. I’ve added only a brief, bracketed note at the top explaining the linguistic shift, a kind of small plaque next to the artifact. It serves as a reminder, both to me and to any future reader, that the words we use today are only on loan. The meanings we so carefully assign are temporary tenants, and the pages we leave behind are not monuments, but messages in bottles, subject to the changing tides of the sea they float upon.

Notes & further reading

A few pages I came back to while writing this: