Words shift meaning across historical periods and individual authors

Evidence

Thus the child discovers that the grammar and the vocabulary of Phaedrus are not those of Cicero, nor those of Plautus, nor of Lactantius or Tertullian, and that the same nexus of sounds does not have the same meaning in different periods and for different authors. Latin and Italian are continually compared; but each word is a concept, a symbol, which takes on different shades of meaning according to the period and the writer in each of the two languages under comparison. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 362

Categorization

• XREF: This is Saussurean diachronics and the historical contingency of the sign — connects directly to how Orientalism/Islamophobia readings treat ‘Muslim’ as a category whose meaning shifts by period and speaker. — connects to: The meaning of any tool depends entirely on its historical moment — The Friends of Attention, Attensity!: A Manifesto of the…, 424; The same Latin phrase flipped meaning across eras due to cultural change — W. David Marx, Status and Culture: How Our Desire for…, 243
• SEED: Could seed an essay on how categories like ‘terrorist’ or ‘moderate Muslim’ are period-indexed signs in exactly Gramsci’s sense.