> The “Social-Communicative” level barely changed in size. But nearly a quarter of the words in the 1953 list are gone, and 39% of the 2023 words are new. Humble, loyalty, fellowship, generous, polite, and companionship gave way to community, identity, organization, ethnic, gender, and narrative. ...It offers fewer words for the people directly around you, but more for belonging at a distance.

I would blame inequality on this one. In a more unequal world tribalization is a survival strategy and language follows.

When you see everybody else as your equals then focusing on describing that individual person, instead of their group, makes more sense.

Economic inequality affects deeply how we think about others.

I don't follow your reasoning at all. It's a shift and what people talk about and write about. It can't be anything more than that, by construction.

What I see is shifting from a focus on individuals and close personal relationships to a focus on the functioning of society and, well, identity.

It seems like a swing of the pendulum to me. Encouraging people to create their own identities, creating vocabulary to describe one's identity, and advocating for a restructuring around society that is relatively collectivized economically, but culturally celebrates individual diversity. I'm not a professional historian, but I think that's somewhat of a new phenomenon historically.

And it's clearly a reaction to the perception that the ideals of equality and being uniformly kind to each other we're not enough to bring about a just and equitable society, and if anything were abused in order to suppress diversity. We still have to be kind to each other at a basic level, but it's not enough anymore.

So maybe now there's too much focus on that stuff and not enough focus on the part where you should actually just be nice to your neighbors and be humble and all that. Or, maybe people are disproportionately writing about it, because it's a new thing, and a lot of people know a lot to say about it, and a lot of people want to talk about it.

I don't think it makes a shred of sense to conclude that somehow the world is now more equal than it was in the 50s. It's disappointingly far from equal, though, and I think the change in lexicon is a change in people's focus specifically because the old system clearly wasn't working, and people are eager to try something different.

I can't quite follow your point. Are you saying there is more inequality today than in 1953?

I would blame it more on globalization.

In 1953 people were not exposed as much to different groups of people far away.