City folks have always yearned for life out in the open spaces. So, it's no surprise that marketers, land developers and even less-principled persons have copped onto once-familiar country terms, turning them into something entirely different. Consider these few examples:

• Farm: That seems simple enough. But today, it's stretched to mean incorporated residential subdivisions. To you and I, it means "farmed out."

• Meadow: It used to mean a peaceful grassed tract of ground given a rest from cropping. Now, meadows are another term for concreted subdivisions.

• Lane: It still means a dead end, even in suburbia.

• Rock: This one, along with stone, was stolen decades ago by musicians.

• Bale: Most farm kids have bucked hefty bales. Farm dads call them muscle-builders. City kids may be more familiar with hefty jail bails.

• Plow: While farmers once plowed ground to turn it over, it first morphed into having one's brain rolled under by drugs and/or alcohol, then morphed again to today's slang term for having sex.

• Grass: Once just legal livestock feedstuffs, it's becoming a prime human ration that's still illegal in most states.

• Hash: Mom's recycled fried potatoes has been re-hashed several times. First it was converted to a cannabis drug, then digitalized into an electronic hashtag. 

• Stack: While hay and straw is still being stacked, the term has morphed into genetic modification of far more than hay crops.

• Cloud: The first thing next-geners think of is where their smartphone data and pictures are stored, not those puffy white cumulous "cotton balls" floating in the sky. These days, most Northeast farmers would like to see more of the latter since they don't carry rainfall.

• Fishing: While the term morphed into phishing, it still means dangling a hook (albeit a digital one) to snare personal information via email.

• Pork: The "other white meat" has been cannibalized by politicians to bring "bacon" back to their local districts.

• Milk: No longer a sacred "mother's milk" term, it's used to market all kinds of nuts and non-nutritional stuff.

There's no point to getting uptight about such changes. Instead, see the humor in society's constant evolution.