Last month, we saw that when it comes to language, many people see the overthrow of customary usage with consternation or even indignation — especially if the change seems to result from widespread carelessness or even ignorance.

Imagine if everyone under, say, the age of 30 began saying New Bork. Every­body has always said New York — perhaps with recognizable variations (New Yawk, N’Yahk, etc.). But now people are starting to say New Bork: They still spell it with a Y but now say it with a B.

How would you react? With annoyance? With amiable insouciance? Would you yourself adopt it, as if it might add to your youthful flair?

Let’s say you asked someone about this usage, with a hint of displeasure, and were told, “It’s just the way I say it. All my friends say it that way, too. Don’t be so old-school.” This type of experience is well-nigh universal.

Mind you, nobody is actually saying New Bork. Please don’t start that. It’s just a fictitious example. But it’s not all that far-fetched. Let me explain.

Your Dank Kitchen

Consider the word dank. You might think it means “disagreeably damp,” only to discover that a younger relative uses it to mean “nifty” or “cool.” You trouble yourself to look into the word and find that the new meaning derives from marijuana-culture slang. Dank pot is said to be highly desirable. So your niece or nephew who describes your new kitchen as “dank” is paying a compliment.

Oh dear. At least that change isn’t likely to spread beyond slang and become Standard English. The scenario I just described, by the way, happened with my twelve-year-old nephew — who was surprised to learn that the word, as he was using it, had anything to do with marijuana. “All my friends use ‘dank’ that way,” he said innocently. And I believe it.

Hopefully in the sense “I hope” or “It is to be hoped” was the much-debated word in the 1970s. The traditional sense was “in a hopeful manner,” as in “He looked hopefully into her eyes.” In the 1930s a few people started using the word in the new manner, and by the 1960s it was attracting the attention of usage mavens — who disapproved.

E.B. White first noticed the new hopefully in 1971, and soon it was so ubiquitous that he’d given up the fight. He wrote to a friend:

I regard the word “hopefully” as beyond recall. I’m afraid it’s here to stay, like pollution and . . . death and taxes. . . . I heard the word first when I took a very pretty granddaughter of mine to dinner at Le Cheval Blanc. I asked her when she expected to move into her new apartment, and she replied, “Hopefully, on Tuesday.” I can’t re­member what I was stuffing into my mouth at the time, but I remember choking on it.

Although this new sense of hopefully began as an Americanism, you can barely watch a British television show today without hearing it repeatedly. Hopefully may well prove to be the most successful Americanism ever launched, apart from okay (dating from 1839).

Peruse Carefully (Forgive the Redundancy)

Few people get upset about humbled (traditionally meaning “humiliated”) being used, as it now is in almost every acceptance speech, to mean “honored.” Award-winners typically say they feel “humbled” by whatever honor they’ve been given. Supposedly the connection is that they mean to say they feel inadequate to the honor. But listen closely and you’ll find that most people who say they’re feeling “humbled” are in fact quite chuffed. The dictionaries haven’t caught up with that one yet.

By contrast, they’ve cursorily documented the reversal in the meaning of peruse. In the 1400s, the verb meant “to examine with care.” By the 1500s, it meant, more specifically, “to read carefully” or “to pore over.” That’s how the literati still use the term.

In recent decades, the word has come to be used in the near-opposite sense “to skim or read hastily.” In Garner’s Modern English Usage, I cite three instances from the 1990s and 2000s: He quickly peruses the stack of documents (1997), Thornton hurriedly perused the rule book (1997 — while two baseball teams anxiously waited), and I very briefly peruse the authors (2010). Those usages seem not to be in keeping with the history of the word.

What does the Oxford English Diction­ary (OED) say? Unfortunately, the big book (available only online in the current, third edition) doesn’t separate the “close reading” from the “perfunctory reading” senses. It uncharacteristically lumps them together. But then it also has an unusual usage note: “Modern dictionaries and usage guides, perhaps influenced by the word’s earlier history, have sometimes claimed that the only ‘correct’ usage is in reference to reading closely or thoroughly.” It rejects the idea that peruse is narrower than the generic read:

Peruse has been a broad synonym for read since the 16th cent., encompassing both careful and cursory reading. . . . The implication of leisureliness, cursoriness, or haste is therefore not a recent development.

But then the OED contradicts itself in the very next sentence: “The specific sense of browsing or skimming emerged relatively recently, generally in ironic or humorous inversion of the formal sense of thoroughness.”

These clashing assertions, alas, are accompanied by no real evidence. How recently? We can’t tell. Almost all the illustrative examples are consistent with close readings. Only Samuel Johnson’s 1759 reference, about advertisements’ being “very negligently perused,” supports the note — and he was surely being ironic or humorous.

Perhaps one isn’t meant to peruse the entry in the traditional sense.

Are there lessons here? Yes: (1) When you wonder about a linguistic innovation — especially if you’re tempted to disapprove — it’s well worth consulting a historical dictionary such as the OED to find out how old it really is. (2) You shouldn’t accept a dictionary’s word uncritically, especially when it comes to usage notes — which tend toward editorial commentary.

Those, believe it or not, are unchanging truths.