Biologists have theorized that the earth has witnessed several mass extinction events—apocalyptic events in which as many as ninety percent of the earth’s animal species suddenly died off as a result of some abrupt change in climate. Some alarmists warn that another such mass extinction is going on even now. Whether there is any truth to this I cannot say, but I will take a page from their book with an alarmist claim of my own: we are in the middle of a mass extinction event of a sort—not of species, but of words and their meanings. This should be … Continue Reading “The Mass Extinction Nobody Talks About”