Language Reform
20th May 2021
In the past, many examples of language reform tended to come from the “euphemism treadmill,” where a term has become associated with empirical tendencies toward bad things, so a new term is invented to make people forget the statistical correlations. But then they notice them anyway, so a yet another new term has to be invented.
In contrast, not using “schizophrenic” to mean “multiple personalities” would be language reform to make language more empirically realistic. Perhaps there isn’t much of a constituency for that?