#19: Good, Now My Arms Won’t Be Cold
As much as your grouchy high school English teacher tries to tell you otherwise, language changes, and that’s okay. The meanings of words change. The way we use them changes. Even the way we pronounce them changes. That’s just how languages work, so you can ignore all those people who start clutching their pearls when “@” being used as a verb gets added to the dictionary.
You want to see proof of that? Just read an old document, like, say, the United States of America’s Bill of Rights. “The right to bear arms” was a perfectly normal and comprehensible phrase in the 1700s – and it’s still perfectly comprehensible these days, just far less common. Nowadays, if you’re not familiar with that particular turn of phrase, it can get a little confusing.