Words have always fascinated me. Take a table, for example. Someone must have looked at the object and decided to call it a table. That is understandable. But how did it happen that most people in the world who speak English call it a table. There are regional differences in the names of things. British and American English call some things by different names. But ultimately everyone knows what a table is.
The now-suspended Twitter/X account @CorrectNames had some really good names for things we already know by another name.
Those are excellent! I love prison pony and bread moisturizer but all of them are fantastic!
https://www.etymonline.com/word/table
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/table
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/tabula
https://youtu.be/oiC-rJk3hH4?si=9lPSbbvgXUUwzkex
I think it’s like any other word, *especially* in english. It evolves. People rarely look at something (new) and say “that is a plorpit now”. Most english words in use are derived from existing words, and those existing words evolve from somewhere else, (ie table from tablet from tabula). It’s happening very fast right now. The evolution of people using “less” when the correct term is “fewer” or even the movement of words like “vlog” to mean “video blog”, which are both word-mashups on their own (videre/audio & web/log, which can be further broken down, but you get my point.)
I have a big love/hate with language. I had an ongoing text file of amusing mutilations of words/phrases I ran across while online and my partner & I call them “tocksicks” (a pluralisation of the semi-phonetic spelling of “toxic” that was the most egregious one & first one I started recording). The most common I see is “walla” for “voila”. Who knows, in another generation it will BE walla (being of French origin, I doubt it, but it may take on a whole new life in English).