Corruption of meaning

Homicide and verbicide – that is, violent treatment of a word with fatal results to its legitimate meaning, which is its life – are alike forbidden. (Oliver Wendell Holmes, The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table, 1858).

The use of foreign words aside from technical terms, tends to be rather emotional and vague. They are often used with meanings and in grammatical contexts quite different from their original ones. This degrades the local culture and robs the young of the profundity of their own language.

Language that describes abstractions or ideas more readily loses its meaning than language used for concrete things.