Verbicide (n)
vurb-uh-sayd
The willful distortion or depreciation of the original meaning of a word.
Literal meaning; word murder.
Example
“C.S. Lewis on verbicide. “Verbicide, the murder of a word, happens in many ways. Inflation is one of the commonest; those who taught us to say awfully for ‘very,’ tremendous for ‘great,’ sadism for ‘cruelty,’ and unthinkable for ‘undesirable’ were verbicides.“”
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