Catsy> Thanks for the excellent summary. I’m not stupid enough to think my post will make much difference to most people but I did write it as a constructive alternative to me snarking on more people who clearly haven’t got a clue what the acronym originally meant. Hopefully it helps.

Scruffy> “take umbrage to is the heavy handed and almost casually degrading way i see people attacking anyone they don’t agree with anymore”

Such as your responses here? You seriously wrote the above with a straight face? That’s like me complaining about people being pedantic.

Do you own “epic”? Because i’m not certain that has the same meaning for everyone either.

No it doesn’t, and that’s part of the problem. The word “epic” has a discrete meaning. I’ve noticed over the last 15-20 years that it’s been slowly becoming the new “awesome” or “cool”–to the point where it communicates nothing of substance beyond “this is great”. Used idiomatically to refer to something that has an epic scope or feel, it’s appropriate. As a boilerplate compliment, it’s annoying.

Languages aren’t a static thing–they’re tools for communication that depend on shared understanding, and that shared understanding can change over time. But that cuts both ways–because over time we’re diluting our descriptive language into an interchangeable collection of adjectives that lose their individual flavor and have no substance beyond “good” or “bad”.

I think this sort of thing is what Tim was getting at with his post about NPU: it began as a way of complimenting innovative or novel parts usage, particularly the usage of “useless” or limited-use parts in creative ways. It has become overused to the point where it no longer carries much weight–it’s used as nothing more than a generic compliment, a way of saying “I like how this part works or looks here”.