Not to derail (yet again on this topic), but it is understood that in Hamlet the phrase turns on the culpability of the one who utters is, not the object of the phrase. However, with the dynamic nature of language, at what point does the common idiomatic understanding of the phrase become its actual meaning?
A very good question, and probably worth chatting about at length in another thread. Also, very well put. We should make a bot that auto-posts that every time somebody is acting Gerty on these here rjkarl boards.
My boards policy: it's something about the nonsense appropriation of Elizabethan baby-talk that bothers me. Watching otherwise smart people use the word "methinks" to try and look clever is silly. My personal crusade against the Cervantes phrase almost eradicated it for a short time. Ultimately, you could (accurately) say I was "tilting at windmills."
My real, sort of authoritative opinion: There are plenty of other idiomatic phrases that have dramatically changed senses (and that's cool, whatever) but it matters especially in cases where they directly reference a literary document that you could Google in five seconds. It's bad reading more than it is the "dynamic nature of language". Also, this is only partially about *language* -- the misunderstanding of the word "protest" is only half the problem.
This isn't a perfect analogy (for more than one reason), but when people commonly quote a bible verse more or less correctly but completely misinterpret it, do you think we should just change the "common idiomatic understanding" of the verse because of the dynamic nature of language? Why not? Why should this case be any different?
My guess, and correct me if I'm wrong, is that you spend much of your time in the pulpit trying to convince people of the *ideas* undergirding the content of the bible, in part to show how others' misuse of the words themselves means that they are also, more importantly, misunderstanding the meaning behind them.