Living language

no worries I'll use it the wrongliest

He wrongly assumed he was using the word wrongly.

Incidentally, I really hate that the UK expression for when someone is feeling sick is "poorly".

It's got the "ly" ending which is one of the clear signs of an adverb, and in other contexts it is used as an adverb. But, for some reason the British have turned it into an adjective meaning sick. Sometimes they use it in a way where it can be seen as an adverb: "He's feeling poorly", in which case it seems to be modifying "feeling". In the North American dialect you could substitute the adjective "sick": "He's feeling sick". But, other times they say "She won't be coming in today, she's poorly". What is the adverb modifying there, "is"?

Think different

And then the speakers from insular communities get told to fuck off with their special definitions, or they're so persistent that the new definition catches on. Either way, problem solved.

The word "literally" still serves its old purpose just fine, along with the new one.

My pet example is Americans and "ironically/unironically".

Please don't do this to me

Didn't english literally develop in an insular community (britain)?

I literally love and hate this comment.

Lol, I came here to make this exact comment

That's dumb (which originally meant "mute" or "unable to speak")

My usual example is manufacture — to make by hand, but it's more commonly used now to mean machine manufactured and made by hand is called handmade.

I mean, I’d still call 1 out of 10 people dying “high impact.”

It was originally killing 1 in every 10 by lot. In other words, not in battle, but as a collective punishment of a unit 1 in 10 soldiers would be randomly selected and killed.

1 in 10 soldiers dying in a battle doesn't sound all that bad. But, 1 in 10 soldiers being selected to be killed as a form of punishment for the unit sounds a lot worse.

Yay, pseudoliteracy wins. Again. 🤢

Some word usage just becomes so common everyone, even generational gaps understand it. If you talk to an 18 or a 65 year old and say the word blowjob, they both know what you mean, yet they aren't out there blowing on dicks or trying to force air up urethras... Hopefully...

I feel like people forget that words can have multiple definitions. You can have a technical definition and a popular definition

If it is not literally everyone, it still might be correct in the way that using a word for (one of) its jargon meaning(s) is correct. So, correct in context.

When using words to convey information to an audience to whom you might not be able to clarify, it is useful to use words for the meanings listed in common dictionar(y/ies) ("correctly") so that the audience can resolve confusions through those dictionaries.

I mean this i show it literally works, right?

I was not aware of the crescendo one and looked it up. Imagine my surprise learning this dates back at least 100 years ago with the Great Gatsby (have not read it). I am now irrationaly angry that I'm learning about this way too late to complain about it.

How does someone use crescendo wrong?

Literally holds meaning, two meanings principally. They just happen to be opposite. "Literally" could mean either "actually" or "not actually, but similar in a way", but wouldn't ever mean "duck".

How do you feel about other words with their own opposite meanings, like dust or sanction? If the meaning isn't clear it's almost always because the speaker constructed a sentence poorly, which of course can lead to misunderstandings even when not using contronyms.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contronym

Literally was being used as an intensifier in both cases where it was being used to signify the truth of something and in the absurdist manner. So, no, it didn't lose all meaning. So long as you're not emphasizing something too absurd to be considered real, the original meaning still holds. And if someone uses the word to emphasize something that could be real, though unlikely, they'll likely get the appropriate follow-up.

On the Crescendo one, do you also get mad about forte? Cause basically the same thing happened there. And no one will confuse the music term for the colloquial term in either case.

That evolution has happened SO many times. Why does "literally" give you fits when "awful" or "terrific" do not? Perhaps because it's the shift you happen to be living through?

I think "whence" is a near-perfect example. "Whence" means "from what origin".

The word is used nearly exclusively in the phrase "from whence it came", or "from (from what origin) it came"

Do you care a lot or only a little?

I literally don't give a shit

I can't tell if you're using this idiomatic expression in the wrong way on purpose for a great joke, or in an annoying, unaware way. 😅

::glares:: Well done. 😆

I will hunt you for sport.

YeS, YoUrE rIgHt. aS lOnG aS tHe mEaNiNg iS uNdErStOod, iT dOeS NoT mAtTeR.

I hate you.

For all intensive purposes, the meaning of words matters less than how we use it.

I think you mean fewer than how we use it lol.

I'm filled with unreasonable blind rage now. Thank you.

I guess it’s a moot point

Definately!

I don't see the backside of Morpheus' head.
Should look like that:

Just realised there's a gun pointed to Neo's head in both images

It's better to use words correctly, but in ways that call your understanding of the definition into question.

"I hacked into my sister's facebook when she left it open on her laptop."

"In an act of philanthropy I gave George the rest of my fries."

"Mr. Hands died for his passion, a modern day saint."

Minor gripe - it's not right to say that everyone has to agree, but it is sensible to point out that one person has no real basis for having unique meanings for terms and then reacting poorly when others fail to use them.

Every word had an evolution or hard origin, and each stepping stone on those journeys had some first user. By whatever means, some of those new words or new tweaks on existing words caught on and spread.

And sometimes, despite generally widespread acceptance of a change or a new word, some folks will bitterly hold on to the old ways for years or decades until they just die wrong about it.

Yeah TRVE, making a point of intentionally being dumb usually means you're an insufferable cvnt

Can I have some more pixels please

Would you mind providing us a few more pixels? Only if it is no trouble o'course.

/j

I think I had a stroke reading this.

Written word is a facsimile of a facsimile of what we're actually communicating. We go from nebulous thoughts, concepts not bound by language, to sounds that roughly convey those concepts, and then to squiggly lines that roughly convey those sounds, and then back up the chain in the other person. Really, it's a miracle we understand each other at all.

Idioms don't have to (and often don't) make sense. How do you feel about "head over heels"?

Well I could care less if can't do that

People need to start saying "God be whit ye!" again instead of "Goodbye" which IMO has nothing to do our Lord and Father in Heaven

Irregardless, you can still make fun of people for anything. Remember the US president and that disabled guy?

No, you should not.

Illiteracy isn't a valid excuse.

I'll die on that hill alongside 'on accident'.

I can't help but think about 1984's newspeak whenever I see something like the abominable "unalive". I know the reasons are different for this particular one, but I agree that we seem to be moving into that kind of direction.

For me it's adjective/superlative escalation. Hey, this bagel is awesome. It fills me with awe. It's much better than this soda which is terrible, it strikes me with terror how bad it is. It results in having to throw in intensifiers, which we're exhausting as well. Wow this movie is so fucking good. It was worth leaving the house for.

I've also been both a second language teacher and second language learner. It is really hard to teach a language where 50% of the words are culture dependent and old texts are completely irrelevant. It's very hard to learn simple language and be told it's wrong now.

People talk about descriptivist drift like it's 100% inevitable or even good, ignoring that we have finally reached an era of long term preservation of text and speech, and of global communication. We could be the first generation to be understood plainly for millenia. And what we are deciding to do instead is to make language from 100 years ago sound like Chaucer.

Agree++

That's literally how accents and dialects work. People in a bubble developed different linguistic shifts. To them, and to to broader world as a whole, they are speaking a correct form of English, and yet some thick accents are practically unintelligible to people who haven't practiced hearing the accent. We only recently began worrying about being understood beyond our narrow in groups. For the majority of history, these "bubbles" are just what we called cultures.

who cares what people think? we're all going to die anyway, just use the words you want to use to say the things you want to say. whether or not you align with a stranger on the internet is only as relevant as you want it to be.

"Everyone" meaning folks off-line who you feel the urge to keep correcting because you got hounded by grammar nazis on the internet and now the "correct" meaning is branded into your skull.

But using figuratively wouldn't really ever be correct either. "Literally" is usually used as a hyperbole, so if you would replace it with figuratively it wouldn't work as a hyperbole anymore. So it would change the meaning. Just because something is meant figuratively doesn't mean people would use the word figuratively to describe it.

Were they using literally like figuratively or were they using literally figuratively?

even worse, everyone spells that word wrong

ok here’s three examples of exactly what the meme is referring to:

• “Awful” originally meant “awe-inspiring” or “full of awe,” but frequent use to mean “very bad” eventually became the standard modern meaning.
• “Peruse” traditionally meant “to read carefully,” but common casual use to mean “to skim or browse” has become widespread enough that dictionaries now record both senses.
• “Nimrod” started as the name of a skilled biblical hunter, but repeated ironic use as an insult (for example, in cartoons... “Bugs Bunny”) led to its accepted modern sense of “fool” or “idiot.”

Language changes. Words mean what we say they mean since its all made up anyway.

Ignorance of what? It seems that if you're using a word the same way your sub culture uses a word, it's correct. Or rather that words can only be used correctly within a context.

¿ Por Que No Los Dos ?