>Just look at "flammable" vs "inflammable": "inflammable" was once misunderstood to mean its opposite, and now it's common AND accepted for "inflammable" to mean "flammable." Is there anyone here that can question that this was a bad idea and should have been fought back when the misuse was first occurring?
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I've assumed in the past that "inflammable" came to be understood to mean "capable of burning" not because of a reversal of meaning or a confusion with "flammable", but because both words have somewhat synonymous roots. I think that Sam and many other conscientious writers in English break "inflammable" into "in-" and "flammable", which indeed makes it seem that people are erroneously attaching a negative prefix to a word without changing the meaning of the word to its opposite.

My (unresearched) guess has always been that "inflammable" is, instead, to be broken into "inflame" and "-able", in which case it is given the perfectly natural meaning of "able to be inflamed". In that case, "inflammable" (able to be inflamed) and "flammable" (flame-capable) are indeed synonyms, although "in-" has the appearance of the negative prefix, making it seem that they should be antonyms. Let me emphasize that this is a guess that I've never researched, and if I'm woefully mistaken, please do let me know. :-)

On the subject of language rules shifting over time with popular usage, I read not too long ago that at least one major linguistic scholar is now recommending that we abandon the rule that prohibits ending sentences (and phrases) with prepositions. The rationale was that this and certain other rules of English grammar are artifacts from Latin which don't necessarily belong in our own language. English isn't even a Romance language, yet because Latin was always stressed in the educational system, its grammatical rules were applied to English as well. The resistance of most scholars to abandoning the "ending-with-a-preposition" rule was alleged to be simply the stubbornness of intellectual elitists clinging to their cherished Latin academic tradition. Not completely a persuasive argument, but interesting.....

Iss "language languishes" achar