It’s almost as if the English language adapts over time. I’m sure in the 1580s when the word “Gleeful” was seemingly introduced people felt weird about it too, heh.
How so? The vast majority of the English language we use today, that’s “formal,” has been the evolution of what was “slang” back then. I don’t understand your argument here..
It'll always be a subjective argument. On one side you can have rigid formalists who hate any change. On the other there's no rules at all.
I'm not at those extremes. I consider the origin of the word. A few years ago I started seeing "griefer," and it quickly became apparent that these people didn't know there was already a word for that: spoilsport. It's those instances that I bitch about, because it reflects ignorance and an unnecessary obfuscation of the language.
I'm down with adding words, including slang, that didn't have an equivalent. One example of foreign origin, "bokeh," really serves a purpose: to describe the aesthetic quality of blurriness. Cool.
