Semantic theft ≠ semantic shift

Yglesias is really making me cross, I must say.

https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/1507029260657168389

Come on. This is not primarily (or secondarily and you could go through quite a lot more numbers) an issue of linguistic change. The word is not some relatively unimportant vocabulary item, it’s the word that names the female half of the set of human beings, the half that is the source of all human beings. That’s what matters about it. The fact that “language changes over time” is not central to this controversy and he must know that perfectly well.

Mar nails it.

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