"I am so random"

[grshpr2001]

I am sooo hyper.

[trece13]

Through random changes of their base roots?

You have a point, but words change meaning once that meaning passes into common usage, right? Until the it's generally accepted as wrong.

Where is that line?

[MiloscLeprechaun]

I used to be friends with a girl who used to do a forkdance every time she picked up a fork, sit down and then say "LOL", yes, used to SAY lol, "that was so random of me!"
The day I finally told her it wasn't random because she did it so often it had becaome a normal part of everyones daily routine and pretty expected, and when it was "random" (i.e. the first time and, well, that's about it), she looked like an absolute fool anyway, she stabbed me in the leg with her fork.
Which was almost random, and very painful.

I think it's due to this that I now hate people who refer to themselves as "random" more than anything else in the world, except maybe forks.

[victorsrn]

Ah, copypasta! I'll have a little Parmesan with mine thanks! :top:

[December]

Mostly just through reinterpretation and cultural change.

[TheWizarde]

But it doesn't just pass into the collective consciousness of man. Even the most acid-ravaged hippy would believe that to be nonsense. So it must start somewhere (maybe in a few isolated places at a similar time) and spread. Just because it's commonly used doesn't make it right (think old wives' tales). But it becomes "right" via common usage.

[rebeccabobrovskis1987]

I'm certainly not going to have a semantic argument about the difference in your mind between right and "right". The simple fact is that it starts somewhere, and because of a mixture of its meaning, the immediate context in which it is used, the cultural context and various other factors, people either find it an interesting enough turn of phrase to repeat it or think it's being used right so will use it themselves. So many words that once never existed but were once made up and simply sounded right, or words that once existed with a completely different meaning but were once used in a different context and sounded right, come into common usage; I accuse words like "admittance" of things like this. Compare: omit, omittance; permit, permittance; remit, remittance. Preferred forms are "admission", "omission", "permission", "remission" as in the Latin verb mittere, whose past participle is missus - just like "mission" (lit. "sending" - compare with "missionary").

A simpler example is the one I used before: the transition of the meaning of "gay" from "homosexual" to "bad", simply because not all that long ago homosexuality was culturally taboo and frowned upon.

[EmilyLucindaa]

I edited it to tidy up the poor grammar, not to alter meaning in any way.


I'm not disagreeing with you [generalebriety]

If 10 people use a word in a certain way, are they wrong? What if they are in a small minority for years, but it gains popularity after they die, are they now correct?

I'd speculate that it's a minority who use random in this way, so it's wrong.

[Goldengoddess]

dude seriously?, smoke some weed and relax

[tmcblue]

This. Long ago, nice used to mean precise.