When my daughter was born, it felt like my entire brain reorganized itself. I didn’t recognize the self I had been before I became a mother. The world was changed, and I felt raw inside of it.

Does this sound like a trivial use of the human intellect? I thought so, especially since I spent 17 years in college and earned four college degrees from four different schools.

From stone tablets to iPads, these seven everyday words have abandoned their original meanings so completely that using them ...