Nah, I’m just fighting the battle for Literally and Crescendo. Those are my hills to die on. I can’t save the entire literary world by myself.

You shouldn’t use religious slang in your writing, it offends the Puritans.

The concept that precision in meaning isn’t important to writing is silly. Literary license is one thing, but using words that are flatly wrong and then demanding they be accepted is nonsense.

Would you be so understanding if some artists wanted to start labelling the color red as blue, because they feel like it, and they don’t care how confusing it is, or how dumb it makes them look?

Or if musicians started playing random accidentals in their Bach performances, because they don’t feel it’s important to alter keys at their whim?

I understand that civilians are under no obligation to follow the rules of language, but writers should be striving for precision in their language. Impressionism doesn’t really work for literature. You can’t be blurry.

From the perspective of a person who relies on specific language in their sector, like music or science or auto mechanics, seeing a word that has a specific, precise definition that we rely on to communicate within that world, being used incorrectly, doesn’t just muddy the writer’s narrative and meaning, it compromises the writer’s integrity, and questions their competence. They are writers, shouldn’t they know the precise meanings of every single word they use, and use it in the proper context?

A good musician knows every single note they are playing, and that note’s context within the harmonic and formal structure of the work they are playing. Even a single wrong note is absolutely unacceptable. If a musician played with the same acceptance of imprecision that this thread is suggesting is okay for writers, they would never be considered a competent musician.

There is no problem with a writers using specific jargon to elevate their prose, but they have an obligation to use those terms precisely. Otherwise, just make up your own words. Stop fucking up everybody else’s, especially those that require precise meanings in their original, normal use.

Love it.

“I have to return back to the ATM machine, but I forgot my PIN number.”

Look it up, it’s actually fairly complicated, depending on whether you are talking about storage media, vertebrae, Frisbees, etc. and then there is a layer of US vs UK that gets involved.

Oh, yeah, and as for the answer about pizzas, they’re Round. I’ve never called one a disk©, or a circle.

Or maybe those other things shouldn’t have happened, but it’s too late for them. Now we have to save the words that are in danger now.

If a boat is sinking, and I’m saying we have to save those people, would the proper response be “Well, where were you when the Titanic was going down? Why aren’t you all worried about them?”

There is certain language that is technical to specific things.

A writer wants to borrow language from other worlds to add spice to their writing, so perhaps they borrow a musical term because they think it will describe an action with a special flair. He basically knows that the word Crescendo is a word that somehow relates to intensity, although he’s not exactly sure of the nuance of it, but it has a really musical sound, and will add some nice flavor to his sentence. So he writes about something “rising to a crescendo” and every person who ever had band as a kid, or took piano lessons, etc. CRINGES.

It’s not just about shifting language, it’s about writers not offending their readers with imprecise, poorly chosen words. A writer should strive to choose the absolute correct word, with the exact nuance, and using Crescendo in place of Climax is an egregious example of a poor, imprecise choice that compromised the narrative, and worse, makes the reader question the writer’s competency.

Truman Capote once sat at a bar with another writer, who said “I’ve spent all day working on one page,” and Capote said “I spent all day working on one word.”

That’s because he wanted to choose the exact word, with the precise nuance, to tell his story. I believe that Capote would agree with me about Crescendo.

Looks like a stethoscope to me.

Do you mean Disk, or Disc?

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.

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.

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.

It was Henry Ford and John D Rockefeller who killed public transportation like electric trolley cars, so they could be replaced by gas guzzling vehicles.

Perfect, embroider it on a pillow.

Considering that Harvard educated assholes have been a major part of fucking up our government, in not so sure that Harvard should still be considered such a paragon of human knowledge. It seems like more of a social club for aspiring Sociopathic Oligarchs.