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Old October 2nd 05, 07:08 PM
Jeremy Nixon
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Floyd Davidson wrote:

It does not necessarily have to be that one grew out of the
other. However, I *don't* see them as totally unrelated.
Rather, it is a logical progression.


When you have two terms that mean different things, and you change one of
them to mean the same thing as the other, that's not progression, it's
regression. It's entropy. It's loss of meaning and precision for absolutely
no good reason -- there was no need to change the meaning of the term, since
another perfectly good one already existed.

And now you have what used to be a perfectly good term, "prime lens", that,
having become ambiguous, is now *useless* for *either* of the meanings we
are talking about here. It is a dead term. It can't be used to mean
"fixed focal length" because that's stupid and it doesn't mean that; and
it can't be used with its original meaning because everyone thinks it
means something else.

Not every change in language is "evolution", or anything approaching a good
thing. The changes made by marketing people, for example, are always bad.
Marketing is responsible for more abuses of our language than anything else.
Evolution adds something; all this does is remove.

--
Jeremy |