For a while now, I’ve noticed an interesting change in usage. I wonder when it began, and why. One says, “dream,” where once one would have said, “ambition.” Most recently, and prompting this post, a young man who is working very hard to establish himself in professional football referred to his goal as his “dream.” It’s not a dream, of course, a brief, usually incoherent, frequently nonsensical sleep event, nor a “daydream,” those more organized, fanciful waking reveries. He means “ambition.” Has ambition become tacky? Something hard and mean? A dream is soft and mostly innocuous (hasn’t always been so, but now), but an ambition might produce cruelty. I suppose an insight found in a sleeping dream or in a daydream might become an ambition, but an ambition might turn to evil or good. Interesting shift. I’ll look into the history of usage when I can.
Premodern Ramblings 