Blog/2026-03-07/Semantic Drift

Many years ago, semantic drift caught an author unfortunately unawares. After she put in a lot of work to write a book describing how homosexuals received capital punishment for centuries, it was found not days after her book was published that a sentence of 'death recorded' does not actually mean that the person was killed.

It empowered the trial judge to abstain from formally pronouncing a sentence of death upon a capital convict in cases where the judge intended to recommend the offender for a pardon from the death sentence. In the vast majority (almost certainly all) of the cases marked ‘death recorded’, the offender would not have been executed.

— Richard Ward, quoted in The Guardian

This particular example is exacerbated by the British tendency to use overly confusing terms of art in their bureaucracy. I suspect this is intentionally done to obscure the purpose of that term, and to provide a shield of jargon around the bureaucracy, but regardless it does render history of the era complicated without context.

This came to mind recently because I read a funny quote about Terence Tao:

'At least', I thought, 'the parents and the teachers involved were courageous enough to attempt something designed at meeting Terence's special needs.'

— M.A. Clements

In the vein of the urban myth that Einstein was notoriously bad at Mathematics, perhaps one day we will be informed that one of the best mathematicians of our generation was a special needs individual as the phrase has come to be used today.