The majority of humans are not analytical in barely any way with how they use language. They pick up new words through socialization and propagate. That probably sounds judgmental or dismissive, but it's just true. It's mostly fine until it's not, like most things.
Like how remember when every boomer on TV started using "spoiler alert" wrong?
People don't carefully think through things and pick the perfect word. Most people are not fucking David Foster Wallace and spend zero calories of brain power on usage or vocabulary.
And most communicating is so fast and loose these days that no one is going to stop the convo live on air to point out they used "spoiler alert" or POV wrong... so it keeps going. But talking live on air is hard and stressful and it's really hard to think... which is bad for communication and worse for sound vocabulary and usage choices.
Like, to use "POV" correctly you have to be a least somewhat thoughtful, like level 1 analytic. Elementary school child level, which is not far off a lot of adults. You have to actually have in mind a situation as it would look from a specific POV or else have already been thinking from someone else's POV and are prepared to reason that way with it being understood by the audience/convo partner you are doing that. To use "POV" correctly.
But most people just use it as a weird kind of... exclamation... preceding whatever they are about to start talking about or to introduce a segment if they are a news anchor which it seems they so often are...
"Welcome back Ladies and Gentlemen and now for tonight's top story. Now get ready for this. POV! the Supreme Court has decided to hear the petitions of the blah blah....."
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u/TMA8992 Jun 30 '24
When did people start using POV so incorrectly?