Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Pianist Corner Two peeves about terminology

PL - I think I understand and appreciate where you are coming from, but IMO (as someone who also taught teenagers for a time) if you only feed teenagers what they WANT to hear, it is less likely that they will be receptive to what they SHOULD hear (i.e., proper terminology). They want to be adults - so treat them as adults.

How old were you? I vaguely remember that very young children tend to call all music "songs", in the same way they extrapolate and generalize other words they know to cover things for which they have not yet learned the right word. Maybe that's what is happening now - the whole world is being overrun by tots.

I agree. And I think some teachers get pretty desperate in their attempts not to appear old-fashioned to their students, which is kind of sad.

However, it wouldn't surprise me in the least if being old-fashioned becomes a new fashion at some point. There are hints of that already, in the whole "steam-punk" thing.

It isn't exactly like xeroxing. There may be a Xerox brand, but the word itself is from xerography, which was the name the inventor gave to the process. It comes from the Greek root xeros, meaning dry, and which he chose to distinguish it from already existing wet copying methods.

I never could properly figure out cricket (I guess I was never that British) and pace currawong, I got to the point where I didn't really care one way or the other. (And memories of pouring rain on the Worcester cricket ground.)

OTH, I love baseball, and some of my new American friends are promising to take me to a Mariners game this coming season. (But do they ever play better than the Red Sox?) Yet after proper amounts of beer, I do suppose it should be fun whatever happens.

Oh, I assure you I don't care one way or the other either! But you have to have some excuse to spend the summer flopped on a chair with a glass of wine, haven't you!

I am so terribly ignorant concerning sports that I should rather hide under a chair!

OK, it's isn't exactly the same, it's almost exactly the same.

Ha-ha! Good thought, wr! I was about 8 years old, maybe 9. Old enough to know better, I suppose, but then, even coming from a family of fairly careful language users, no one had corrected me to that point, including the piano teachers!

And, yes, I agree it does sometimes feel like the world is being overrun by tots. (I was going to write a rant, here, but thought better of it. I will simply shake my head in resignation and nod in agreement with you.)

YES, it isn't exactly the same, it's almost exactly the same.

I'm a gonna text my m8s about this thread

But your post assumes that "song" is not proper and correspondingly that words can't change meaning.

It's not as though teens want to hear "song", it's just the word they know. I think far more than teens that use this word for any piece of music.

PL - Both observations above are valid. Words can (and do) change meaning - for better of worse. We can either roll with it - or try to fight it if we feel so inclined.