memes

Les Québécois sont entrés dans la conversation.

My first reaction… “not in fucking French…”

I remember when that word meant something.

If I have a cake, then I can definitely eat it, but if I eat it, then I can no longer have it.

If you change "have" to "keep" it is clearer in both instances. The second interpretation is clearer because it puts the consumption verb first, which implies this action precedes the subsequent verb. But the underlying statement holds true in either instance.

The example of “antisemitism” (a bunch of people are using the word to describe valid criticism of the state of israel) raised in an other comment here is also very relevant.

The joke of "antisemitism" is that Semitic People include Arabs and modern day Ethiopians/Somalians, two groups who are very explicitly and unapologetically persecuted by the Israeli state government. They do not include Eastern European expats who came to the Levant by way of Philadelphia.

Modern Western media describes an antisemite as a kind of anti-white racist critical of other western Jewish people in elite social circles. But the actual historical antisemitism - the one Henry Ford railed against in The International Jew and spammed across post-WW1 Europe after getting his brain cooked by Protocols of the Elders of Zion - is rooted in Christian Nationalism and anti-Immigration conspiracy theories that fit far more neatly with post-9/11 anti-Muslim racism and Cold War hostility towards the Third World.

The manipulation of language in this instance is a very deliberate effort to judo-flip the very idea of bigotry. You turn social energy aimed at pursuing an equitable and egalitarian society into an excuse to segregate the population and persecute poor immigrants and minorities.

This is where marketing creates special kinds of linguistic nightmares. Effectively, marketing is bullshit that becomes standard usage because it's so pervasive and people unfamiliar with the field don't know any better.

Hence LLMs are called AI. Two wheeled electric fire hazards are called hoverboards. 3G, 4G, 4G LTE, 5G, cell services usually aren't up to the standards they claim.

It makes little sense to think of language outside of communities, so if a speech community uses a word in a certain way then it's correct in that context.

Of course, most states find it useful to establish an official variant. It is usually based on whatever the ruling class speaks, and is claimed to be 'correct', but there are no objective linguistic criteria which make it possible to say that Parisian French is more correct than e.g. Haitian French.

Seems like a variant of hypercorrection.