2026.08.10
One example is "blog"... the old shortening of "weblog". For me, that's always referred to the entire site, so I might talk about "a piece on my blog". Over time a second usage has become more common where "a blog" refers to a single article, e.g. "I just wrote a blog, tell me what you think".
I'm a descriptivist and understand that language evolves for reasons that aren't always clear or logical to me, but I dislike how blog's change is generating ambiguity. I guess you can always say "blog site" for the whole collection and "blog article" or "blog piece" for a single thing, but it's frustrating.
Compare that with "compute" as a noun, as in "all this AI is taking a hell of a lot of compute". At first I disliked the usage, but I came around to seeing it as more concise than "computational power" (and as a buzzword is more inclusive of some more techie details)
Finally, some Gen-Z/Alpha usage watch: the word "nonchalant" is gaining some new shades of meaning. To Gen-X and older, nonchalance is almost always a positive thing (actually now that I see that written... that might reflect something about Gen-X's infamous checked-out-edness)
But I'd say historically nonchalance has is more often than not an admirable thing - calm, controlled, relaxed, approachable.
Now there's a newer shade of it that sometimes (but not always) points to it as performative, a front people put on so as to seem less engaged / concerned than they are. (There is also a fun backformation of "chalant" as the opposite.)
Like for both nonchalant and chalant, there's the idea that sincerity is probably better. If you're actually relaxed, that still can be a good form of nonchalant, and if you're buzzing with excitement, let your chalant flag fly. But I find it interesting that the younguns have added a layer to what was formerly an unalloyed good (old folks would have to mark someone as being "deceptively nonchalant" or similar.)