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.
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).
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
“Literally” only holds the opposite meaning when used as a hyperbole.
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.
I sure hope you say pizzas are disk-shaped, not circle-shaped.
Disk and circle are properly defined geometric terms. Civilians can’t just come in and start misusing them.
To be fair maybe you do make the difference between disks and circles, but the point is, you (and everyone) almost certainly “abuse” some other language element that will also annoy somebody else. And if they corrected you, when all your life you and people around you had done the same abuse and understood each other perfectly, you’d think, rightly, that they are being pedantic.
Everyone can do with a language whatever the fuck they want.
Intelligibility is the only rule in a living language.
So go suck your bravura, and prima vista all over your colla voce.
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.
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.
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.
I’m gonna get the shit downvoted out of me for this, but the problem with this idea is that insular communities tend to redefine words and then expect everyone outside their bubble to know their new definition. Doing so also robs the language of a word that served a specific purpose, such as in the case of the word “literally.”
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 issue with “literally” is that it’s become an actual part of the dictionary definition rather than being recognized as merely a hyperbolic use of the word.
Dictionaries are books of history, not law.
Language pedantry is a branch of theology.
But every word can be used hyperbolically.
Those two sentences are not mutually exclusive.
Dictionaries can also note hyperbolic (and other “deformed”) uses of words, especially when commonplace, I see no problem with that. You have some odd expectations from dictionaries.
A dictionary is a record.
Language influences the dictionary, the dictionary doesn’t influence language.
Didn’t english literally develop in an insular community (britain)?
English is what you get when a community can’t defend its borders and keeps being taken over by new rulers with a different language, which then works its way partly into common usage. Also, random word borrowing, because fuck you it’s ours now.
Not insular enough to be isolated, hence that saying about it being three languages in a trenchcoat.
Of course not isolated, but insular, literally.
Ok ok… I’ll be the one…
“Wrongly”
no worries I’ll use it the wrongliest
You can always go wrongliester!
I’ll use it righteously.
not not-heinous
He wrongly assumed he was using the word wrongly.
Very bigly, indeed!
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
Some flat adverbs sound perfectly natural to most speakers, like “play nice” or “drive safe”. Others have less acceptability among people in general, like “That tastes real good.”
I don’t even see “nice” in “play nice” as an adverb. You could switch “play” for “be” – “be nice”, same with “be safe”.
There’s that old line that if my aunt had wheels she’d be a bicycle. Maybe the command form is muddling the topic here, but using the be-verb with an adjective like that attaches a subject complement, essentially describing the subject. But “I am fast” describing a person doesn’t mean that saying “I drive fast” is describing a drive as a noun.
Honestly, I could care less about this shit.
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
And I don’t want any of your shit.
I grew up on dairy farm and it was one of my chores to shove the shit and then spread that shit nearly everyday. So I’ve had enough shit. I’m so done with that shit and the assholes it came out of. And I don’t need anyone giving me shit anymore either.
So you just keep your shit to yourself.
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. 😅
Its obviously a joke.
But maybe you understood that and your comment is sarcastic as well. So now I am the one being woooshed.
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.”
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 . . .
Yeah TRVE, making a point of intentionally being dumb usually means you’re an insufferable cvnt
We should probably resist hyper simplifying language, but whatever, I guess.
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.
The printing press was invented in 1440, the era of theoretical long-term-preservation has been here and languages keep changing despite it. We aren’t going to hit the brakes on the specific period and culture that you happened to have been born into either.
The irony of someone named Soggy telling me about data preservation on paper is wonderful.
It’s not even really the change, it’s the rate of change. We are accelerating towards mutually unintelligible dialects at an outstanding rate, and at the same time do-nothing linguistic graduates are pleased to denigrate the idea of at least having a single widely-understood vocabulary so that a Malaysian can speak to a Scotsman without having to carry a dictionary.
Fully explaining why the thing you’re asking for is both impossible and undesirable is a job for an anthropology thesis, but the tl;dr version is that it’s a short and straight line from your position to advocating for cultural genocide.
Sure it is. Short and straight.
Go on, lecture an Irish person about cultural genocide. I so wish we had a culture but we don’t speak Irish anymore so of course we are a grey blob that nobody would recognise as distinct anymore 😪
Edit: downvote and run when “we just observe 💛” college rhetoric meets physical reality.
The reason most Americsn linguistics students equate language and culture is because a foreign language is the only different culture they’ve ever been exposed to.
Agree++
Only if they all use it the same wrong way?
This is real and actually quite interesting to look at the history of. For example, the word “Decimate” IIRC was originally defined as killing one for every ten people of a group of people. Now, its used as a term for high impact destruction.
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.
That’s a good one. In school they had me memorize a novel of Latin root words, which is where things can get frustrating. You take a word and piece together the meaning, only to find out the definition has changed so drastically over the years that the root words are now nonsense. Both of our examples fit this description.
Yeah, I’m prone to go down rabbit holes looking at the etymology and origin of related words for hours. Latin was one of my favorite classes in high school. It’s great for world building and stylizing prose when writing fiction.
Sometimes the etymology is just weird because the current meaning is from an abbreviation of a phrase and the roots don’t make sense in isolation, such as perfidious, from the roots per fidem “through faith” but its meaning is from the larger phrase “deceiving through faith.”
I mean, I’d still call 1 out of 10 people dying “high impact.”
You are technically correct, the best kind of correct.
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.
IIRC the other nine had to kill them, by beating with sticks? which makes it so much worse. Rarely used in extremis I believe.
Yay, pseudoliteracy wins. Again. 🤢
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.
Literally.
I literally love and hate this comment.
That’s dumb (which originally meant “mute” or “unable to speak”)
Lol, I came here to make this exact comment
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.
Can I have some more pixels please
May I have more pixels please
April I have more pixels please
June I have more pixels please.<- period
I don’t know, june you?
“Everyone” is a very, very high bar.
No because I’m not a proud antisemite despite some people’s use of the word
Ok I won’t search that one. Explain please
Antisemitism has be co-opted and applied to any and all criticism of Israel, as opposed to it’s previous meaning, hatred of Jews/Judaism. This isn’t strictly because the meaning of the word is being used differently as much as it is that proponents of Israel like to conflate Israel with all of Judaism, or even more broadly with all Jews (as an ethnic group as opposed to a religious one). Since Israel takes any criticism to be hatred, the inevitable consequence is that criticism of Israel becomes antisemitism. I’m splitting hairs here and probably making things more complicated than they need to be… But hopefully you understand what I’m getting at.
Incidentally, even in its more broadly accepted definition “antisemitism” itself is a bit of an etymological oddity, because “Semites”, or the Semitic people, are both Jews, Arabs and others… Judaeophobia is an alternative that is unquestionably specific to Jews/Judaism.
I would of made this post myself but I like literally don’t care enough.
should of would of could of
