Well, since this thread's been randomly bumped, here's a pet peeve of mine that's rooted in a growing mangling of terminology in today's vocabulary, and I've mentioned this before in other threads:
When a work of fiction - particular TV shows - is described as "family" entertainment, because the work is about a family. That's not accurate at all, but it goes to show you how mindsets have shifted among the entertainment industry and society in recent years. To say many of today's show like THE SIMPSONS, FAMILY GUY, MODERN FAMILY, and others are "family" shows is almost an out-and-out lie, because it's far from the truth. Shows about families are not necessarilty "family shows": family shows are shows that are suitable and acceptable for families to watch, meaning the show is free of questionable content that children as well as adults can watch as families, which the above mentioned show aren't. There actually is a term for shows about families, care of TV Tropes; such shows are called "domestic comedies", or "domcoms" for short. That's a lot more accurate and less misleading as well.
It's similar to how when I and other GenYers were kids, "DTV" refered to those Disney specials that were modeled after MTV, which set clips from classic Disney shorts and features to popular songs of previous decades, but now "DTV" refers to direct-to-video movies, which used to be called just that: direct-to-video, but we as a culture are so lazy that we always have to abbreviate any excessive verbiage that we can because we don't want to have to say complete terms.
Which also brings me to how so many negative terms are now being turned into positive terms. I think that started with Sarah Palin turning the term "rogue" into something positive to make herself look like a better and more free-thinking and indepedent person... but now, also, like the term "twerking" used to be a derogatory and somewhat racist term that refered to white girls trying to dance like black girls, but since Miley Cyrus has made twerking positive, the term twerking is now also positive. Similarly, "hack" used to refer to the act of someone illegally infiltrating/intercepting your computer and basically running havock on your hard-drive, but now it refers to little everyday fixes and tricks that help make your life easier.
It gets confusing, and it doesn't help our particular culture out at all: they say English is the hardest language in the world to learn, well no wonder - we keep inventing new words and changing meanings or old words, no wonder people never know what we';re talimgabnotu.
When a work of fiction - particular TV shows - is described as "family" entertainment, because the work is about a family. That's not accurate at all, but it goes to show you how mindsets have shifted among the entertainment industry and society in recent years. To say many of today's show like THE SIMPSONS, FAMILY GUY, MODERN FAMILY, and others are "family" shows is almost an out-and-out lie, because it's far from the truth. Shows about families are not necessarilty "family shows": family shows are shows that are suitable and acceptable for families to watch, meaning the show is free of questionable content that children as well as adults can watch as families, which the above mentioned show aren't. There actually is a term for shows about families, care of TV Tropes; such shows are called "domestic comedies", or "domcoms" for short. That's a lot more accurate and less misleading as well.
It's similar to how when I and other GenYers were kids, "DTV" refered to those Disney specials that were modeled after MTV, which set clips from classic Disney shorts and features to popular songs of previous decades, but now "DTV" refers to direct-to-video movies, which used to be called just that: direct-to-video, but we as a culture are so lazy that we always have to abbreviate any excessive verbiage that we can because we don't want to have to say complete terms.
Which also brings me to how so many negative terms are now being turned into positive terms. I think that started with Sarah Palin turning the term "rogue" into something positive to make herself look like a better and more free-thinking and indepedent person... but now, also, like the term "twerking" used to be a derogatory and somewhat racist term that refered to white girls trying to dance like black girls, but since Miley Cyrus has made twerking positive, the term twerking is now also positive. Similarly, "hack" used to refer to the act of someone illegally infiltrating/intercepting your computer and basically running havock on your hard-drive, but now it refers to little everyday fixes and tricks that help make your life easier.
It gets confusing, and it doesn't help our particular culture out at all: they say English is the hardest language in the world to learn, well no wonder - we keep inventing new words and changing meanings or old words, no wonder people never know what we';re talimgabnotu.