Young women - Michael Rosen
Semantic change:
- pejoration (negative connotation) - e.g., awful used to mean full of awe
- amelioration (positive connotation) - e.g., bad or phat in the '90s
- narrowing - e.g., meat used to mean any food, then animal flesh, then now is more for red meat
- widening - e.g., xerox and the like, or guy, which was a man's name, then a term for generic man, and now means person
- metonymy (part for whole, whole for part) - e.g., the White House to mean the entire executive branch, saying Boston when you're referring specifically to the baseball team, or an older example, cheek is from the old English for jawbone, or couple used to only refer the thing holding two beasts of burden together
- euphemistic, e.g., loo or john, or things like not using gay for happy
- grammaticalization, e.g., literally, or going to/gonna
- meiosis (change from strong to weak), e.g., awesome, and one of my favorites, epic, as in that's was an epic McDonald's order. (Really? That McDonald's order was on par with Homer's Odyssey?)
- hyperbole (change from weak to strong), e.g., curvy to mean fat
- metaphor, e.g., ring to mean call, broadcast formerly meaning to cast broadly
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