Strengthen with Necessary Premise Questions - - Question 38
One sure way you can tell how quickly a new idea--for example, the idea of "privatization"--is taking hold among the ...
AshkanAugust 25, 2022
W
I chose E because I did not realize that the unnegated AC is already weakening the answer and under a time constraint, I rushed into choosing it. However, I am still not convinced that AC D is correct. Even if a word goes under severe distortion, we could still argue that the distortion of that word may eventually become the general idea for that word used commonly by the public. I need to look at this question later with fresh eyes.. but I appreciate alternative explanations besides the one provided under the correct answer. Thank you.
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I would take D to mean that the word's meaning does not change. That is, the distorted meaning would be something that is completely different from the original meaning. If this were true, the use of the word would not be an accurate measure of the original meaning's popularity, because people using it would be referring to some other idea, rather than the initial one.
For example, lets say we are trying to measure the idea of being amazed by the power of something in a negative way. The word "awesome" originally meant this, but if we measured the popularity of "awesome" we would see a spike just around the same time it acquired positive connotations. Thus, the shift in meaning makes the test useless to measure the original idea's popularity.
