50quidsoundboy wrote:PhilB wrote:it may well be oxymoronic, but that's the richness of the Engliish language for you
exactly this. language is a product of culture, and meanings (or "definitions") follow usage in real life, not the other way around (regardless of what dictionary-thumpers would have us believe)
I disagree. Language must have order and structure for it to be intelligible, descriptive, and thus remain useful. To use pale and black in the same sentence to mean the same thing is far from descriptive; it is absurd in fact. Leave alone that the phrases "Pale Ale" and "IPA" are among of the most abused words in the language anyway. It presupposes that IPA is a rigid style description, which it is not. IPA is in itself an absurdity; the nearest that most so-called IPAs have approached India is Slough, and commercial examples of stuff labelled IPA vary in colour from pale to mid-brown, have gravities from 1033 to 1055 and have hop rates that vary widely; hardly a descriptive style. I cannot see the point of compounding one absurdity by loading it with yet another. Surely there are enough intelligent home brewers out there that can come up with a name for the stuff that is descriptive without bastardising the language.
Most people determine the meaning of words when they first hear or read them by analysing the context in which they are seen or spoken; all of us get this wrong sometimes. It is an eye-opener to have something like a Kindle application with a built-in dictionary, which makes looking up the meaning of a word a trivial matter. It comes with shock horror when one realises how many words that have been misunderstood for most of one's life.
A change in the meaning of a word is usually because the true meaning has been misunderstood by the masses, or even misheard. An example of misheard is that "hatch" and "hash" sound very similar when spoken, so the octothorpe symbol( #) which was commonly known as a "hatch", from crosshatch, has become "hash" in modern British common usage. However, misunderstanding or, more precisely, ignorance is not a valid reason for words changing meaning. If the language is to be dynamic, then it must be dynamic in a sensible way. To permit meanings to change spontaneously at the whims of the ignorant is to lose clarity, to lose precision, and degrade the language's usefulness.
It seems to me that many people hide their ignorance behind a cloak of perceived language dynamism, but they naively believe that it means that anything goes, and absolves them from the responsibility of using the language properly.
Most of us above a certain age were taught the rudiments of Latin and old Greek as part of our English lessons at school. The reason for this being that by learning the roots of our language we were less likely to use words like "chronic" when we really meant "acute" and "decimate" when (perhaps) we meant "annihilate" and many other examples of word misuse that are very common these days, often used by people who should know better.
I wish that I had paid more attention at school.
... if people want to debate whether it's a style, then fine, but complaining about the phrase "black pale ale", and brewers describing their beer as such, because it's oxymoronic is about as pointless as complaining at Shakespeare for describing parting as being "such sweet sorrow" 
... that particular cat is well out of the bag.
