Earlier quoted context omitted.
We are having a communication failure here. You wrote, see the emphasis, «[/]superior[/] first world» in apparent reply to member flohofwoe's «former Soviet scientists and engineers trying their luck with 3rd world despots». You wrote that «"third world", according to [some] Western definition, ... were those countries that were poor (and also perceived as primitive and culturally backwards, so the term eventually ca…
« When people mention 'third world', they are assumed to mean Sauvy's frame » Well, that's what you're assuming. I had never heard of Sauvy and was totally unaware of his definition that had lost all meaning by the time I grew up (and I guess the same holds true for most other participants). But okay, learnt something in the process. What I took issue with in floh's comment in the beginning was not some improper defi…
No, again the point is not clear.
When people mention a concept, they are assumed to know it. If the concept is "third world", that corresponds to the page of Sauvy you read. People may not know that concept properly, and create a superstition, and oftentimes will: that does not mean that the concept is replaced by the product of its ignorance. The proper concept in intellectual use remains untouched by its misuse; its misuse cannot have pretensions of preeminence. The terms do not «lose meaning»: they are simply misused by the ignorant and shallow - which intrinsically forcibly have no authority over it; what happens is that a twisted meaning will be spread, and that is just a natural phenomenon of the life of concepts. The people in the street are not the authorities. The meaning of 'spleen' is determined by a subset of doctors and a subset of poets, not by the a mass of near-laymen.
When people hear of "Schroedinger's cat", some, maybe many, will probably think "Mr. Schroe was very lonely; one day he found a cat and got to be a happy fella...": that does not replace the proper concept introduced by Schroedinger. People will do any disservice to it, and that you can suspect - but still there is no legitimacy in assuming that when /specific/ people talk about Schroedinger's cat, they mean "lonely people finding comfort" instead of the difficulty in determining etc.