How is it that, having said become instinct all their lives, people suddenly start to say go extinct? I use this as an example. I can understand the acquisition or disposal of a piece of slang, such as cool. It might have been possible for a young thing in the 1950s who looked on the enemy as ‘squares’ to say something like, ‘I am just one cat in a world of cool cats,’ as Norman Mailer did in 1957. With maturity and a change of fashion it would have been impossible in the 1970s to utter with a straight face the word cool in this sense. Now we pick up from our children, like some flu virus, cool meaning ‘OK’.
But why should become extinct change to go extinct at the dictate of fashion? On Radio 4 last week someone read out a little bit of a book by Bill Bryson.
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