This kind of double meaning in English is very common. The word murder can also be used as “to perform badly”.
A way to look at it is English often has two forms of words like this. There is murder (general) and there is Murder (specific).
As someone who is bipolar, the “misuse” of labels around mental health is aggravating. The misuse of “rape” is the same.
The general usage of words dilutes the impact of the specific use. I’d love to bring back capital letters to English nouns. That way we could use Murder and murder to clarify what which meaning is used.
I also came here to complain about this use of the word "rape". If you titled this article "The Tragic Rape of Charles Bukowski's Poetry", then it would be used solely as the original meaning. The current title is specifically designed to invoke the idea of a sexual assault - what if the title used the word "Corpse" instead of "Ghost"?
Also, is sexual contact with a corpse rape? As of 2015 it was not in Massachusetts and many other US states:
When you die, you lose your status as a person, Troyer explains, although you are still human, your body or your remains are quasi property. “You’re not really a subject, but you’re not fully an object,” he says.
But the 'take by force' meaning does not make sense, as nothing is being taken from anyone. While its a literary crime, Black Sparrow Press is not doing something they don't have the right to do.
The original meaning of the word was “to take by force”. Using it to exclusively describe sexual assault is a more modern thing.
https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/rape
This kind of double meaning in English is very common. The word murder can also be used as “to perform badly”.
A way to look at it is English often has two forms of words like this. There is murder (general) and there is Murder (specific).
As someone who is bipolar, the “misuse” of labels around mental health is aggravating. The misuse of “rape” is the same.
The general usage of words dilutes the impact of the specific use. I’d love to bring back capital letters to English nouns. That way we could use Murder and murder to clarify what which meaning is used.