Senator Menendez - we’ll have to wait just a little to see how well the investment turns out

Says the human

Cat disagrees

Kerry Breen is a news editor and reporter for CBS News. Her reporting focuses on current events, breaking news and substance use.

Most cars used to be ridiculously easy to steal, and people dealt with this situation in a variety of ways. Suing the car manufacturers was not one of these methods.

I don’t think your phone analogy is at all comparable. A phone catching fire during what anyone might consider normal use isn’t the same kind of product design issue as a car that is no easier to steal than most cars were for most of the history of cars. The old covertible that I had years ago would have been way easier to steal than these cars, for example, both because of simple wiring and simple access to the car interior.

We can pass the blame for this issue around pretty widely. I don’t think we should just pin all the blame on the car makers

I dunno about suing them. Lots of things are easy to steal. If there were a Tik Tok trend of stealing garbage cans, I might make an effort to secure the ones I have, but I wouldn’t sue the garbage can manufacturer for not addressing the possibility of theft if mine were stolen. These cars do have some theft protection, at least to the extent that you can’t accidentally steal them. Car owners should probably do what they can to deter theft, Tik Tok & YouTube should dissuade users from encouraging kids to steal, parents should be more responsible, and (not that it would necessarily help) all cops should stop being bastards

I am saying that the word had a particular meaning when it was coined. Many people seem to use it for other things, and the dictionary reflects this. It seems odd to mean that a word that is almost nakedly a combination of electricity and execute is used to not mean killed by electricity, but it is the case

I’m not really sure what your objection is to what I’ve said.

Well, it certainly did, and that is the way I use it. I have heard people use it in other ways

I’m not disagreeing that it can sometimes happen as you’ve illustrated above. I am saying that it often does happen that coiners of new words know just what they mean by them. The person who came up with ‘electrocute’ knew exactly what he meant by it - to kill with electricity (notice how the word is a portmanteau of electricity and execute). That the word has started to be used by some as a word to mean something less specific is to me unfortunate, but is a good example of how words change over time. At any rate, it seems obvious that sometimes the definitions of words arrive fully formed at their birth, though not always so

You’d have to be pretty strict about what you mean by ‘definition’ in order to claim this. When words are coined, it seems likely that the speaker knows what he means by the word, even if he hasn’t written the definition down somewhere