The paper examines thirteen English words whose meanings and usages have been shifted in Nigeria from their etymologically known forms. Using the semantico-syntactic paradigm, the words were purposively selected and descriptively or qualitatively analyzed, showing their new usages, classes and their standard forms. The paper in form of advocacy held that language - which is characteristically dynamic, always accounts for mutual intelligibility among its immediate users and is better defined pragmatically from the users’ context.