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cdoctorow08/03/20251 replyview on HN

It's not incorrect to use this word colloquially. See this post:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/14/pearl-clutching/#this-toi...

Specifically:

> The fact that a neologism is sometimes decoupled from its theoretical underpinnings and is used colloquially is a feature, not a bug. Many people apply the term "enshittification" very loosely indeed, to mean "something that is bad," without bothering to learn – or apply – the theoretical framework. This is good. This is what it means for a term to enter the lexicon: it takes on a life of its own. If 10,000,000 people use "enshittification" loosely and inspire 10% of their number to look up the longer, more theoretical work I've done on it, that is one million normies who have been sucked into a discourse that used to live exclusively in the world of the most wonkish and obscure practitioners. The only way to maintain a precise, theoretically grounded use of a term is to confine its usage to a small group of largely irrelevant insiders. Policing the use of "enshittification" is worse than a self-limiting move – it would be a self-inflicted wound.


Replies

fragmede08/03/2025

lol damn well I can't argue with the man who created the term! Still, it seems anti-intellectual to want words to have specific meaning and nuance and flavor, and for people to want to be able to have a common dictionary in order to have elevated discourse.

In the days before the Internet, there was only space for a 30 second soundbite and that was the level of discourse. These days, we have Twitter and Substack, so there's slightly more nuance available to us (only slightly), and I'd like to think the "normies", as you put it, are smarter than you think, and are capable of nuance.

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