it's so sad how all the holidays, even such important as Christmas or Easter lose their charm in the course of passing years...as for abusive words, what can be done about it? we can just rely on people's conscience.

I should have thought of this movie earlier in the "red-line" of topics, but the movie "Red Sun" have takes on this topic quite nicely. Worth a watch!

I believe a mandarine is a small citrus fruit with seeds, while a clementine is a small citrus fruit without seeds? Thanks to being seedless, the clementine in recent years has grown more popular and taken over the position earlier held by mandarines.

I would probably say Naan bread, because there are so many widely different types of bread, but not Chai tea because to me almost all tea comes from the same plant and I despite daily drinking tea, I don't see what makes tea labeled Chai different than other tea. Does it refer to tea originating from China or South-East Asia as opposed to India, Sri Lanka or other parts of the world?

Regarding that other comment, I would strongly oppose to make the product name Ipod equivalent to any MP3 or other portable music player. Yes, it once worked for Sony Walkman (although they probably didn't like it), but it arrived in a different era and was one of the first useable portable cassette records, while there were a bunch of brands and noname makes of useable MP3 players long before Apple entered the scene (and in particular if their player can not be loaded with any music of your choice without taking measures of hacking it?!). More likely that "to google" would become another way to say "search the Internet".

Gah, now I got an inner vision of a big orchard basking in scorching hot sun. I see Afro-American slaves pick clementines (or oranges if you wish) into big baskets, while the owner dressed in white clothes and a big hat, lies in a sun bed in the shadow of the trees, sipping iced (Chai) tea and listening to his favorite music on his MP3 player. ;-P

Languages are living things, so the meanings of words change.

English is a language that has changed a lot more than Icelandic in the last 1200 years (back then, they were fairly close). Spanish is a world language like English, but not quite as old. All three have long and proud literary traditions, and are alive today and still changing.

In Spanish it is still common to see the word "minusvalido", (related to the english word "invalid"), describing a "person with a disability". There is also, in English, the word "retarded", which was commonly used in "mentally retarded" to describe a person with an intellectual or cognitive disability.

Once, these words were just factual descriptions chosen according to the usage of the time. But they have gathered associations, from a perceived stigma being attached to the conditions they describe, with the change in the usage of their cognate words, and with a change in how people understand the intellectual and social framework of the past. Thus they have become less acceptable as polite neutral descriptions.

People near my age who were in aboriginal families in Australia were being taken from their parents and taught to be like white people, since that was considered better for them. Currently, the idea that this is a reasonable thing to do is generally considered anathema, and "civilising black people" is seen, like "the white man's burden" as an expression of an idea that was wrong-headed, so expressing the idea except with clear disapproval is considered "ill-educated".

Likewise the idea of having a concubine is out of fashion (although the practise seems about as common as ever - it's apparently one of the things about people that doesn't change a lot). I would be surprised if you have been introduced to anyone as a concubine...

Another case is the English word "eskimo" - or the old Norse "skræling" - which is considered a word used by the uneducated who don't really care, when the polite term is Inuit. These changes take place over years or decades, usually, so people in the middle of the change are always left wondering when it makes sense to drop one word for another. Many of the people concerned don't really see any negative meaning attached to what they consider a perfectly good word, and don't bother changing. Whether, in the end, there are more people who change words or whether it turns out to be a storm in a terminological teacup, with the old word surviving quite happily is often unclear in advance.

The words "queynt", and "pudenda" are now out of fashion. One (in its modern version) is considered extremely crass, the other because it is considered over the top as a euphemism, and a stupid one at that (it literally means "the shameful things"). Yet they were both once reasonable terms to use for what I was taught to call a "vagina". But as something that has a lot of names in English (and other languages) and is pretty central to people's lives in many ways, it's likely to be a word whose usage is politicised, and reflects social trends, more or less for ever. "Paleontology", by contrast, is much less likely to be replaced.

So much for words that change their acceptability. There is a seperate but related question of words changing their meaning. A "factory" in 18th century european colonies was what we would now call a warehouse, and not at all a place where things were made. "Manufactured" literally means hand-made, but has come to more commonly signify things that are *not* hand-made, but mass-produced. This is a simpler process of people not having a perfectly shared understanding of what a word means, or of applying it to something relevant to them that is a slightly new usage.

When this happens differently in different places, you get a word like "jumper". In Australia, it means a garment like a pullover or sweater, whereas in the US it means a completely different thing.

Eventually, a usage of langauge among one particular group collects so many differences that it is considered a new dialect or seperate language - which is why Icelandic isn't the same as Norwegian, and why although you probably know what it means to be 1337 it is a meaningless term to many people.

"The story of English" is an interesting book about one language that is pretty readable (it goes along with a BBC TV series of the same name). There are lots of others.

But to return to your question of changing meanings, it is a bit like deciding who is the most popular girl in class - as much depends on whom and how you ask as anything really measurable. On the other hand, people use langauge fairly often so have to make practical decisions one way or another (iPod or MP3 player? Record player or gramophone? Mail, chain, or byrnie? Ontology or taxonomy or vocabulary or word list or?), which are influenced by political and social nuances as well as mundane things like your actual vocabulary and experience of the subject. It is the sum of all these influences acting among large groups continuously that bring the changes (or not)...