• I’ll be honest I kinda think that word falls under “if few enough speakers of a language know a word is it really a word in that language?”

    If you said the word invidious to the majority of English speakers they would look at you confused. That sounds like it’s not an English word to me.

      • I was mostly just making a not very good joke but now I’m thinking about it more and maybe it doesn’t apply to “invidious” but there is a point where a word is used so little and known by so few speakers of a language that everyone would agree it’s not a part of the language anymore, so what is that point?

        No one would say “Hwæt. We Gardena in geardagum, þeodcyninga, þrym gefrunon, hu ða æþelingas ellen fremedon” is English. But at one point it was, and then eventually English moved on enough that people looked at that and didn’t recognize it. How few English speakers have to recognize the meaning of “inviduous” before it’s not really considered a word in contemporary English?

        • came_apart_at_Kmart [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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          6 days ago

          nah, it totally applies to invidious in this instance. i wouldn’t use uncommon/archaic words to communicate to a broad audience in a press release about public policy. it defeats the point.

          i am certain this usage originated with some Carmine Lupertazzi Jr. type bozo dictating the press release, meaning to say “insidious”, but once it passed spell check / could be shoehorned in, they just went with it because what assistant in this shitshow wants to question the unqualified genius of any of these assholes.