I don't know what you mean. I can assure you that when you look up on the internet and find that a theist is defined as a person who believes in the existence of one or more gods and the prefix a- literally means "not, without"
https://www.englishclub.com/vocabulary/prefixes.htm none of them wrote that based on my personal preference.
Unfortunately for this line of argument, words do not get their meanings from the letters within them. This is a very basic principle. Language only gains meaning from usage and convention.
The a- in atheism is different from the a- in ashore, and the only reason we know this is convention. However you are also arguing that we dispense with convention by disqualifying a common usage of the word atheism because it doesn't match a second convention a = without and theism = belief in gods. So your argument rests on favouring one convention over another, yet you deny you are being subjective??
Meaning is only derived from usage, nothing else.
"'Language does not exist; it is an abstractum. That we cannot enter twice the same river,applies also to language." "Language is no object of use,and no tool,it is no object at all, it is nothing but its use. Language is use of language" " Language came into being as a big city, room on room, window on window,flat on flat, house on house,street on street, quarter on quarter. . ." It is here that his insistence on the context comes in. With Frege and Wittgenstein he maintains that the basic unit of meaning is the sentence and that the word gains its meaning from it" On Fritz Mauthner's Critique of Language - Gershon Weiler
Nope, deism is a subsect of theism that adds the caveat of being an absentee landlord style of god.
Again, words mean things.
Yes, words mean things. You find it hard to accept that they mean many things though, and different things to different people, particularly across long periods of time.
Theism for example according to the OED:
c. Belief in the existence of God, with denial of revelation: = deism n. (and also: A morbid condition characterized by headache, sleeplessness, and palpitation of the heart, caused by excessive tea-drinking.)
So atheism means without theism, without deism and without a morbid condition characterized by headache, sleeplessness, and palpitation of the heart, caused by excessive tea-drinking.
The term atheism originated from the Greek ἄθεος (atheos), meaning "without god(s)"
So using your line of argumentation: atheos = without gods and -ism = a belief or principle, so the belief or principle of being without gods, not the state of lacking theism.
It isn't a(theism) it is athe(ism).
Even if you use the undeniably incorrect argument the meaning is fixed by letters, it still doesn't mean what you want it to.
Seeing as you brought them up, the ancient Greeks didn't use the term to denote a 'lack of belief', it was used to describe a position taken in opposition to the favoured gods. You were without gods because you had backed the wrong horse.
You accuse anyone who disagrees with your definition as doing so out of 'arrogance', yet you state a subjective and poorly reasoned preference as relating to an objective truth.Your definition is 'right' and theirs is 'wrong' as the word 'doesn't mean that', even though it clearly does 'mean that' for many people.
All arguments about meaning simply reflect different conventions and usages, is this really so difficult to understand?
Read as: where you live people tend to use words loosely rather than exactly. Misusing a word doesn't change its definition.
Actually it very obviously does. See words such as cool, gay, bad, enormity, anxious or decimate for example. Also, see your definition of atheism.
All of these words have taken on new meanings through repeated 'misuse'. Everyone has words they hate being 'misused' like when people say 'I've got literally millions of things to do', but language is just constantly evolving use of language so you can't really complain, especially when you are advocating that your 'misuse' has rendered a more common usage to be no longer acceptable.
It's quite comical how some people have so little self-awareness that they think they are being 'precise', 'objective' and using a word 'correctly' by continuing a concerted attempt to redefine a word which historically had a different meaning.
I understand why some people feel that this redefinition is superior, I find it much harder to understand why they find it so difficult to accept that it is merely a subjective preference rather than an objective fact though.
