Fighting a lost cause?

Words can change their meaning by 180 degrees in a remarkably short space of time. Not long ago “prestigious” meant tricky or deceitful; “sophisticated” meant adulterated or falsified; and “peruse” meant to read carefully. The same is true of technical terms. Quintile and quartile, once labels for the cut points that divided a frequency distribution, are now used, even in the BMJ, to mean portions of the data. Which is odd, really, as perfectly clear and unambiguous words, “fifth” and “quarter,” already exist for that purpose. I suppose that “quintile” and “quartile” must seem cleverer or more scientific, rather as some writers use “epicentre” when they mean centre, a pointless hyperbole implying that there’s something even closer to the centre than the centre itself. But there’s no point in objecting, however much you regret the change. A word’s current meaning resides in the way it’s …