Nick, the secondary meaning of podium is lectern, a device to hold a speakers book.Bill
True, but just one more example of how the constant misuse of a word becomes, in time, accepted, irrespective of its origin, roots and original meaning. Other examples are the use of the past participle instead of the past perfect tense: e.g.
The ship sunk. He rung the bell. I drunk it. He sung his song. Give it time and
I begun my trip will be OK. Well, if not OK, at least accepted.
Once a week I teach a volunteer TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) class, mainly to Hispanic men* working in the local mushroom industry (Chester County, PA., is the "Mushroom Capital" of the country), with a few Asians. My Spanish is minimal, and knowledge of Asian languages almost zero, but these are Total Immersion classes; they speak English and only English from the get go.
Some of the more advanced ones often come to me with examples of illiteracies perpetrated by local newspaper writers, and even occasionally tell me of something a TV newsreader or announcer said, that contradict what I am telling them. E.g.
Lay is now almost unversally used in place of
lie: e.g. "He was laying there," which makes me want to scream "what was he laying? Bricks? Railroad track? Eggs?"
It's tough to fight against this. I'm a lone voice, while "if I read it in the newpaper or saw it on TV it must be correct."
Here's one more example of something misused until the error is now universally accepted. The word
caliber originally meant, not the diameter, but the
length of a gun's barrel expressed as multiples of its bore to the nearest whole number. E.g. a cannon firing a 10" dia. ball and with a barrel length of 7' would have a caliber of 8. This was an important part of a warship's specification, as it told not only the weight of the shot the cannon fired, but also the range it could fire it. A typical spec. would be "A broadside of 40 cannon firing 20 lb shot, of a caliber 8." (There were other guns - culverins, bombards, carronades, bow chasers, etc. - but the heavy, long-range cannons were the important measure of a ship's fighting ability).
Today, of course, the original meaning has been completely lost, and now refers to the diameter of the bore. I wonder why and how. If ".5 caliber machine gun" retained its original meaning, it would have a barrel length of one quarter of an inch.
*Hispanic men rarely bring their wives or children. Asians often do.