Irrigardless
Can I have some more pixels please
May I have more pixels please
English is confusing enough. For the sake of future generation I’ll correct you for using litterally like figuratively even if I’m the last person on earth that uses it correctly.
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.
Emphasis and meaning through context are key in the English language. “Correct” Grammar and “proper” RP English can get fucked.
“Everyone” is a very, very high bar.
I’m going to disagree here on the basis that this logic leads to bubbles of people thinking they’re right when they’re not even close to a majority.
I would of made this post myself but I like literally don’t care enough.
should of would of could of
Flammable & inflammable
Biannual & semiannual
Literally & literallyOnly if they all use it the same wrong way?
Honestly, I could care less about this 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. 😅
Do you care a lot or only a little?
I told you, I could care less! It’s a moot point!
But, how much less could you care? Alot less?
Ah, my favourite.
I literally don’t give a shit
What if it isn’t everyone who uses a word “wrong”? What if it’s say 25% of people who use it incorrectly? Should you encourage them to use it correctly?
If there are two different ways of using the word and they could be mistaken for each-other that’s bad. Once the use of a word has flipped and means something very different from the original (idiot, gay, etc.) then there’s no reason to try to return to the original usage. If the usage is still in dispute and the majority of people use the word in the original meaning, I think it’s good to discourage people from using the word incorrectly so that people are still able to understand each-other.
I thnik Subcultures and sub-cultural contexts will always exist.
There’s always some cases where people have - and prefer- a small or specialist audience.
If you try to discourage it too hard you’ll probably end up with more slangs/ patois / creoles emerging. Try to clamp down of business consultant jargon and see what happens, a million worse terms will probably emerge.
But the disputes occur because people use the newer, less common meaning until it becomes more common. If you discourage people from using the word “incorrectly” but it eventually evolves in meaning through usage because people ignore your encouragement to return to the original meaning, then you’d just be on the losing side of the battle historically.
I feel like it should be much more nuanced as to whether you encourage or discourage change. People reclaiming or usurping derogatory terms as a big FU to bigotry? Awesome. People twisting words for the purposes of oppressive, deceptive, or marketing purposes? Nope.
The reason behind the change should be preferably be intentional, backed by goodwill, and done in order to increase ease of communication because the old meaning/usage wasn’t sufficient.
But language is a shared medium and a lot of intention falls by the wayside because of random quirks as much by intentional campaigns.
people use the newer, less common meaning until it becomes more common
And we can work to stop it from becoming more common by nipping it in the bud.
then you’d just be on the losing side of the battle historically
At least you turned up to the fight.
But language is a shared medium
Which is why change should be gradual and limited, otherwise two people who use that language are unable to clearly communicate.
Clear communication is so Ohio, I’ve got rizz.
Or something. I’m too old to make this joke.
But, you’re just one person. You won’t be present for 99.9999%+ of newer usages of terms, so you’ll be impotent to effect much change on the matter. With the level of illiteracy and the anti-intellectualism that seems rampant these days, even having a widely read column on a popular platform might be insufficient to turn such a tide. Maybe at best you’d be a screenwriter for a Hollywood blockbuster that a decent portion of the population watches and you could hope for the best, but even that seems weak considering we collectively don’t even remember movie lines accurately ten or twenty years later.
What if I told you that punctuation goes inside the quotation marks except in rare circumstances?
American spotted. 🎯
My two are Literally, and Crescendo. I really hate it when they are used wrong, and now the wrong answers are considered acceptable. That means Literally actually holds no meaning at all, and by changing the definition of Crescendo, the last 500 years of Western Music Theory have been changed by people who have no understanding of music at all.
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”.
You should literally literally when a literally flies straight for your face because those feathered fowl can be as aggressive as gooses.
Joke’s on you, I’m having roasted literally for dinner
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.
Literally being used in the absurdist manner also dates back to the 1800s
I knew that and wasn’t irrationally angry at this one. A hyperbolic or absurd meaning does not bother me (but I get that its “overuse”, for a while, could).
How does someone use crescendo wrong?
Apparently, to mean the climax rather than the increase leading to it.
It’s supposed to mean an increase in volume, but instead it now means a climax. Saying something will “rise to a crescendo” is a popular saying, I’ve seen many good writers say it, but it is wrong. The rising part IS the Crescendo, and the proper way to say it would be that something “crescendoed to a climax.” It is a specific musical term, with a specific musical meaning, and non-musical people have adopted it improperly.
Civilians can’t just come in and start stealing jargon words and apply their own non-jargon meanings. We rely on those meanings to communicate in that world. It would be like suddenly calling a tire iron a stethoscope, and not understanding why a doctor would think that’s stupid.
is Tire Iron, the same as Tyre Lever?
The climax one is in the dictionary.
I’m pretty sure this battle was lost a long time ago. No idea why OP thinks it wasn’t.
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.
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.
I hadn’t really thought about forte, but now that you mention it, yeah, that one pisses me off, too. Thinking about it, I do avoid using that term.
And Literally is supposed to mean that some thing is truly as described, to differentiate between exaggeration. So when it is used as exaggeration, it causes the sort of confusion that means exactly what the literal meaning is literally supposed to avoid.
Like aks instead of ask? The Internet tried hard to convince me, but I’m still not convinced, sorry!
Looks like aks was the original pronunciation
It’s incorrect for Academic English but not AAVE, there’s more than one version of the language.
It’s called “metathesis”. We did it over hundreds of years with ‘bird’ which was originally ‘brid’ or ‘bridd’, and ‘wasp’ which was originally ‘waps’, apparently.
In German it’s also Wespe, but in my local Austrian dialect it’s pronounced Wepsn. Very interesting, I didn’t know that shift had happened (or I guess not happened) elsewhere.
I thought “wasp” came from the Norman word “wespe” (French word guespe then later guêpe), but is that not true? Or do we just not know and these are possible explanations but there is no consensus?
I will be using bird and wasps, thank you very much
Everyone has to agree tho.
Don’t be one of these dickheads that defines shit their own way then gets upset when nobody agrees with your dumbass. There’s quite a few people like that here on Lemmy and I find them to be the single most annoying type of user on this site.
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.”
“Tiamat is a Bad Dragon.”
Yeah TRVE, making a point of intentionally being dumb usually means you’re an insufferable cvnt
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.
By whatever means, some of those new words or new tweaks on existing words caught on and spread.
By whatever memes . . .
