referring to groups as "them"

[BroomJockey]

... any more.

Yeah, there were ones such as thee, thou, thine, and more, and personally, I think the language is poorer for not having a genderless third-person singular (zhe, or whatever it is, is a damned poor substitute, and not used anywhere near enough to count). In general, actually, it'd be nice to have a more complex pronoun system that would track first and second references in a sentence, so that something like "He went to the other guy's place and said he needed to stop" would be more intelligible, so that you knew which he was which, without reverting to proper nouns.

[Slytovhand]

I absolutely agree!!! Problem... the reason we don't have them is because some people in society thought it was too cumbersome and all...

I think I might do an essay on it (if I can sort of back it up) that it's really ignorance and laziness that changes a language... and thus, for the worse, not the better! If we look at how drastically the language has changed over the last few hundred years, we can get an idea of just how bad it can end up if we don't care to fix it now...

[joe hx]

If we look at how drastically the language has changed over the last few hundred years

last hundred years? hell, the last decade or so
lulz, l33t, telivizzle

should I continue?

[Nyoibo]

Please don't.

[Slytovhand]

lol


had to

[Flyndaran]

The insult cretin came from iron deficiencency induced mental retarded people of Crete.
Whatever word(s) get used to describe an unpleasant condition or group will become offensive making us all have to change what they're called. I hate this silly cycle. I will call mentally retarded people such, and mentallly ill people like myself such as well.
I try not to be rude, but I'm not going to strain my linguistic ability to sound like a political stump speech.