Linguistics: Semantic Drift

Words do not hold still.

"Literally" now means "figuratively" in common usage. "Decimate" originally meant to kill one in ten; it now means to devastate. "Woke" migrated from an African-American vernacular expression of political awareness to a mainstream progressive identity marker to a political pejorative — in roughly fifteen years. These shifts are not merely interesting: they change what arguments are available, which coalitions are possible, and what policies feel legitimate.

Ludwig Wittgenstein's later philosophy provides the theoretical grounding: words do not have fixed meanings determined by their reference to the world. They have meanings determined by use — by the language games people play with them in particular contexts and communities. When the community changes, the game changes, and the word changes with it.

Semantic drift takes several forms. Natural drift is organic evolution through changing usage — inevitable, mostly benign, occasionally confusing. Concept creep, identified by Nick Haslam, is the expansion of a concept's boundaries, typically in psychology and social discourse: "trauma", "addiction", and "abuse" have all expanded substantially from their clinical origins, gaining explanatory power and losing diagnostic precision simultaneously. Deliberate semantic capture is strategic: political and commercial actors invest in changing what a word means because the word controls a contested domain. "Freedom", "natural", "sustainable", and "wellness" are all sites of ongoing definitional struggle.

This skill traces a word's semantic trajectory, identifies the mechanism of drift, and assesses the consequences of the shift.

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