artbrooks

Yea I was being ironic    but surely the words will inform you

opera is a collection of compositions that would rightly in the singular be called "OPUS" - common usage allows us to refer to Operas because we treat an Opera as a single entity - indivisible. Datas will follow - in time. And criterions are close behind. It is a simplification of the language that is being complicated in other directions by the minute with fashion, commerce and mischief.

I just wondered if cafeteria was similarly from the Latin or a portmanteau word from an era (is a singular word similarly to how data has become?) I know little about.

The whole point about live languages is that no one has control. eg The word gay has over the years taken on a lascivious meaning in a heterosexual sense, and been so passe it has lost all oumph several times. Which is why is was adopted by the homosexual community.

Who refers to assertive flirty widowed women as "brisk" these days? Yet brisk whad a very specific meaning when the song about the "brisk young widow and the sooty colier" was in vogue.