It’s amazing to me how quickly natural language evolves. You can often spot changes that happened in your own lifetime.
When I was a kid, something either happened on purpose or else by accident. But now I see that things have changed.
Many people younger than me — adults — now say that something has either happened on purpose or on accident. The new way of saying it makes logical sense, but it’s still a little startling to realize that the version of English that I grew up with is already slightly out of date.
I wonder how many other changes there have been, even in my own lifetime, to our evolving language.
John McWhorter’s “Words On the Move”, 2016, is a fun book on this subject.