cats

No worries, I get what you're saying! (I think)

Yes, language changes over time.

Yes, some terms are basically just shot in the pan, fairly short lived fads... but, sometimes they stick around enough to distinctively form part of a kind of age bracket / location specific dialect, or even spread more broadly.

'Cool' 'Radical' 'Tubular' 'Groovy'... those are all older terms that were popularized by older age brackets, you can take a while bunch of millenialspeak/redditisms as examples as well, 'smolbean' 'chonker' 'adulting', etc.

But also yes, often, terms get reappropriated or basicslly misappropriated, kind of transmuted into having a just totally different meaning, which can then create a lot of confusion when some people are using a more original, domain specific meaning, and then there is a kind of nebulous, vague, commonplace usage of the term.

'Therapyspeak' as proliferated by Tiktok is a great example of the dangers and problems of that.

Tons of people misuing terms that have actual specific meanings, that they then almost always use to essentially weaponize their own narcissism.

There are tons of other more technical terms that have more specific meanings in some field of study, but then also have a vague or different colloquial meaning, and then people will just conflate the two different usage/meanings...

That's pretty much the basis of a bunch of woowoo, psuedo-intellectual, spiritual guru type nonsense, its also used by cults and con artists.

'Energy' in physics is not the same thing as 'energy' used to describe basically someone's demeanor, their current mood.

But, in another comment, up the chain in this thread, I did try to lay out how 'cats are autistic' is actually a reasonably accurate and defensible use of the term.

I think that if people are more commonly using complex terms... actually relatively correctly... that is just a good thing.

It normalizes the idea that yeah, autistic people exist, they are different, and thats ok, and its also ok to talk about how they are different, because maybe we can all understsnd and relate to them better by way of decently accurate analogies.

What would worry me is people using the term very incorrectly, accidentally or purposefully promoting false stereotypes, or just purely using 'autistic' as an insult.

So, I wanted to try and point out some of the details, have the conversation.

Essentially, I'm arguing that language does broadly change over time, and also, broader acceptance and discussion of how neurodivergence actually works is a good thing.

Is me doing that 'forced', not a 'natural' evolution of language? Eh, sure.

But if a whole bunch of people are also just... using the term autistic more frequently... well, I'm not in charge of all of them, but maybe I can try to at least... shape the flow of that river, so to speak, so that more people know more about the word they're now using more often.