Skunked term  

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A Skunked term is a term coined by lexicographer Bryan Garner in his 2008 edition of Garner's Modern American Usage to indicate a word that has undergone "a marked change from one use to another" and is "likely to be the subject of dispute".

Older controversial terms include "decimate", which used to mean to 'kill one in ten' from the Roman practice of decimation which now means 'to destroy' and "hopefully" which used to mean 'in a hopeful manner' but now means 'it is hoped' since the beginning of the 1960s.

Other such examples include "niggardly", "jewfish", "Oriental", "data" and "media".

Recent examples include the 2013 Oxford English Dictionary's definition of "literally" to include "figuratively" and towards 2014 the conflation of 'deep web' with 'dark web'.





Unless indicated otherwise, the text in this article is either based on Wikipedia article "Skunked term" or another language Wikipedia page thereof used under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License; or on research by Jahsonic and friends. See Art and Popular Culture's copyright notice.

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