The other day I went shopping in a place which called itself a 'Supercentre'. It was not the centre of anything (it is on the outskirts of the town where I live), and a centre cannot be super.
People like myself, who teach and write about language, often feel like King Canute who, according to legend, was told by his courtiers that he could do anything, even order the waves to turn back from the shore. Canute, being more sensible than his courtiers, had his throne placed on the shore, and commanded the waves to retreat. Of course they didn't; he got his feet wet, and the courtiers looked very foolish.
The development of language is as inexorable as the waves. We cannot change it back to what it was before, but that does not stop us regretting the devaluation of words, or putting in our three-ha' pennyworth of effort to retard the process.
Most changes seem to be for the worse, by which I mean that they make the word weaker than it was. For example, centre means 'the middle point of anything'. There is only one middle point and only one centre. It is an absolute value and cannot be qualified; either it is the centre or it is not. Nowadays it seems to be used for any large building, or large shop where a lot of things are for sale (eg, building supplies centre, music centre). This devaluation of the word has led to such absurdities as 'supercentre', which is supposed to mean a 'very big shop'.
Buildings, and shops, have an interest in making themselves sound bigger and more important than they really are. So supermarkets become hypermarkets; hyper- as a prefix means 'too much', so presumably hypermarkets are too much of a good thing? Shopping centres (which are not really centres, but it is in the commercial interest of the owners to make out that they are) have become plazas. This is odd, as a plaza is an open area in the middle of a city (Statue Square is a plaza).
Property developers are much to blame in this abuse of language. In Hong Kong I lived in a terrace, which was a tall thin skyscraper, not a row of houses as it should have been; a garden, which did not have a plant on the site; and a mansion which, like Chungking Mansions, was really a tenement block. Then there are courts and halls and so on.
You may say that these are only names; true, but isn't a name supposed to mean something? Your name (Chan or Lee or whatever it may be) conveys a different message from my name (Webster), and if either of us changed our name to Windsor, which would be legally possible, we should be attempting to deceive those who knew us. (Windsor is the surname of the English royal family.) Those readers who are sensitive to changes in language may know that mansion originally meant 'resting place' (as a boy I was always puzzled by the Biblical sentence 'In my Father's house are many mansions'). Its grander use as 'a very large palatial house' is 18th-century in origin. Now it seems to have come down in the world again.