Tell HN: Stop using "dropped" to mean "added"
5 OutOfHere 40 6/24/2025, 4:35:36 PM
I don't know what it is with people using the word "drop/dropped" to mean "add/added", when the latter will do fine. They don't respect the language. People think they're being cool when they're misusing the word, but they're not. Even LLMs have been picking up this bad habit.
The online parlance is obviously stretching that definition a bit thin - but using the term "drop" can contextually be more specific than simply saying something was "added" or "released".
Tis a travestye, for sothe.
The only way for a human language to stay the same is for people to stop speaking it, i.e. Latin - France has trouble keeping French the same, and English is the polar opposite with no ruling body and a history of katamari damacy-ing words from every other language.
Words can mean multiple things, and if there's enough of a gap a new word or usage will rise to fill its place.
Delete works, of course, and I think the opposite to "new feature just dropped" in tech circles is "killed" or "killed off", as in killedbygoogle.com
Civilization will certainly not fall apart if language changes again, as it has for the entire history of spoken language - notably, Old English would be unintelligible to most of us now and civilization is working just fine. I just learned looking this up that Early English had a 4-form system consisting of yea/nae/yes/no ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yes_and_no#The_Early_English_f... ), which is fascinating, and we appear to be doing just fine without yea and nae nowadays.
Anyway, I'll note that release and drop are near-synonyms if you're talking about a physical object, so their similar use for features etc isn't wild at all, and is well established in culture (drop an album, etc), so I don't think this is nearly as big a change (like yes->no would be) as you think.
There also is no inhabited universe in which the words yes and no can survive being flipped in their meaning, because an attempt at such a flip will result in total collapse, in a universe without life.
Among several slang definitions for "drop", Oxford English Dictionary includes "To release or make available" with multiple examples going back to 1988: https://www.oed.com/dictionary/drop_v?tab=meaning_and_use#60...
> They're used as such only by dorks, click optimizers, and SEO scammers.
That's clearly not true.
Everyone has their pet peeves, but this is a ridiculous thing to post a "Tell HN" about.
Did I release the ball from my hand?
Did I drop the ball?
But no, nothing is sacred. Not only that, from a historical perspective, the current pace of language change is shockingly slow because of the impact of media. It would not be at all unusual for a word like drop to move entirely to a new metaphorical meaning causing other words to have to fill in the gap. In German, you "let fall" something. Even if anything was sacred, "drop" would be far, far from sacred. It is very easy to replace.
(The closest thing to sacred is words for familiar, every day objects and people. "Mama" is pretty nearly universal, for example. But even so, we literally don't even know where the word "dog" came from, so no, nothing is sacred.)
There are many many examples if you search (or even better, read the book!), but here are a few:
"silly" originally meant something more like "blessed"
"fear" meant "danger", referring to a thing feared, not the feeling
"nice" meant "foolish" and literally comes from roots mean "not knowing"
This kind of change in meaning is very, very normal. This is just how language works. I really think you will enjoy the book. The author is very easy to read and covers a ton of linguistic ground.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Dropped == released
I kid, of course :)
HN user OutOfHere is a strict prescriptivist.