"In our own day the etymological fallacy is widely honored, as revealed in countless statements by columnists, in letters to editors, and other public fora, which declare for example that the real meaning of doctor is 'teacher' or that the verb orient properly means 'to arrange something to face east' or that gyp 'cheat' is derived from Gypsy (probably), and therefore, its use in any context is de facto an ethnic slur or that decimate correctly means only 'to punish a mutiny' or other serious breach of military discipline by killing one soldier in ten." Doctor, Orient, Gyp, Decimate, Grow, Dilapidated. (Source: Michael Stubbs, Words and Phrases: Corpus Studies of Lexical Semantics. records that the word black has a 'difficult history,' and was sometimes confused in Old English with a similar word which meant 'shining' or 'white,' but speakers would be ill-advised nowadays to use black to mean 'white.'"
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