These days someone might even try to correct you if, in an attempt to note someone was being (overly) humble, you said they were self-depreciating.

But the corruption has become so common that using the original today might not only stop a conversation in its tracks but cause unpleasant face-scrunching. Per Garner, spitting image is now 23 times more commonly used than its precursor.

Have you ever said you felt nauseous? In the traditional sense that would mean you felt like you were capable of causing others to woof cookies, not that you were feeling sick to your own stomach—much along the lines of how poisonous and poisoned work.

Young people today, he says, are now dropping the “from” and simply saying they “graduated college,”

New words, and new senses and uses of words, are not sanctioned or rejected by the authority of any single body: they arise through regular use and, once established, are recorded in dictionaries and grammars.

If you want the easy way out (which looks like the way majority usage is going anyway), you can probably get away with using dependency all the time.

Why is it, then, that although publicly is far more common as the adverbial form of public than publically, the ratio of usage has diminished? Publically is becoming more common for the same reason that people write irregardless in place of regardless or write “diffuse the situation” instead of “defuse the situation” or “all of the sudden” rather than “all of a sudden”: evolution. Language is, in a sense, alive, and just as life itself evolves, so does language—but note that the primary definition of evolution is not “improvement”; it simply means “change.” And how does language change? The change is modeled: New words are coined, or new senses of existing words develop (or new spellings or new forms occur), because someone, somewhere acts to make it so, and the evolution goes viral.

the greatest technology ever invented was language

This is not an attempt to arrest the evolution of the language, but to correct mistakes.

The use ofhyphens in compound words is becoming less frequent exceptwhen essential for clarity of meaning. The customary prac-tice is to write such words as coordinate with the dieresisrather than the hyphen.

In many computing contexts, "TTY" has become the name for any text terminal, such as an external console device, a user dialing into the system on a modem on a serial port device, a printing or graphical computer terminal on a computer's serial port or the RS-232 port on a USB-to-RS-232 converter attached to a computer's USB port, or even a terminal emulator application in the window system using a pseudoterminal device.

Originally he had used the terms usage scenarios and usage case – the latter a direct translation of his Swedish term användningsfall – but found that neither of these terms sounded natural in English, and eventually he settled on use case.

more recent use treats the term as mainly condemnatory

I think that over time the distinction is lost. My math teacher, 35 years ago stated "formulas are used in chemistry, in math we have equations". To this day, the word 'formula' in math seems wrong, but I'd accept it's used commonly.

Each of the programming language generations aims to provide a higher level of abstraction of the internal computer hardware details, making the language more programmer-friendly, powerful, and versatile.

which have recently become umbrella terms referring to any piece of quickly-consumed comedic or relatable content

The Chicago Manual of Style and the Associated Press (AP) both revised their formerly capitalized stylization of the word to lowercase "internet" in 2016.[3] The New York Times, which followed suit in adopting the lowercase style, said that such a change is common practice when "newly coined or unfamiliar terms" become part of the lexicon.

The spelling "internet" has become often used, as the word almost always refers to the global network; the generic sense of the word has become rare in non-technical writings.

In the case of email, it can be argued that the widespread use of the unhyphenated spelling has made this compound noun an exception to the rule. It might also be said that closed (unhyphenated) spelling is simply the direction English is evolving, but good luck arguing that “tshirt” is a good way to write “t-shirt.”

Warning: Many native English speakers find who versus whom difficult and frequently get it wrong. This is also due to the fact that it is falling out of fashion and is often seen as archaic.

I'm increasingly seeing 'login' used as a verb. And to be honest, once it's normalised it will be the correct form.

This work is a minor evolution of bootscale

If a screwed up word or phrase is useful and people like it, it becomes a word. Language nazi’s hate this - but it’s true. Dictionary writers love it because it keeps them employed.

While Web site is still doing well in the U.S., it is all but dead in the U.K. Current Google News searches limited to U.K. publications find only about one instance of Web site (or web site) for every thousand instances of website. The ratio is similar in Australian and New Zealand publications. In Canada, the ratio is somewhere in the middle—about 20 to one in favor of the one-word form.

Languages evolve to suit the needs of the people who use them

English tends to build new compound nouns by simply writing them as separate words with a blank. Once the compound is established (and the original parts somewhat "forgotten"), it's often written as one word or hyphenated. (Examples: shoelaces, aircraft...)

Web site / website seems to be somewhat in a transitional stage, being seen as an "entity" that web page hasn't reached yet. Depending on which dictionary you check you will find web site and website, but only web page, not webpage.

Marginalize provides a striking case of how thoroughly the figurative use of a word can take over the literal one.