Recently a bunch of young people have been using the term “point of view” in a way that’s unhelpful. I say unhelpful rather than wrong because I have zero interest in jumping into the grammar wars, which aren’t actually much of a war. Just about zero people out there are actually strict grammarians, and the collective essaying world has taken sides against “grammar Nazis” at a scale of at least 1000 to 1, so it’s a war against almost no human enemy. You see that with this whole POV business; there’s ten billion essays and tweets and YouTube videos defending the practice and like one guy on the bus who hates it, but we have to pretend that he’s the hegemonic force or whatever. It’s weird stuff, but the impulse ultimately has a clear source: fear of looking old.
The deal is that much of Gen Z (and “Gen Alpha,” which is the dumbest generational name ever devised) uses “point of view,” or “POV,” to mean simply “look at this,” rather than “this image or video is shown from the point of view of X,” the traditional usage. Apparently it’s all over TikTok in particular – a video will be labeled “POV: an elephant,” and what you see is an elephant and not something seen from the perspective of an elephant. “POV: you rollerskated for the first time” but it’s just video of the TikTok user rollerskating rather than rollerskating from the perspective of the rollerskater. You get the idea. This usage is unhelpful and impractical, if you ask me, whether or not we want to call it incorrect! As is so often the case with imprecision in language, this behavior gets rid of a very useful construction and puts in its place something we already could say in many different ways. As with turning “literally” into an empty intensifier often applied to metaphorical use, the mass meta-sanctimony of the anti-grammarian set on this issue has left the English language weaker than it was and called it progressive. And now here the NYT trots out a linguist to tell you that you’re a reactionary for maybe preferring the more useful version.