Over time, words with beautiful meanings occasionally get degraded into ugliness. “Gentle,” for example. Originally meaning good-natured and kindly, it was twisted into “gentry” in the Middle Ages by very un-gentle land barons seeking a patina of refinement. Then it became a pretentious verb – to “gentrify” – meaning to make something common appear upscale. And now the word has devolved to “gentrification,” describing the greed of developers and speculators who oust middle-and-low-income families from […]
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