The term is wildly overused, but THIS is a heckler’s veto: the authorities imposing restrictions on speech based on anticipated hostile reactions to it.
But this is just the latest in a long list of times I, like an old man yelling at a cloud, shake my fist at people refusing to accept that words mean things.
For instance, I will be in my cold, cold grave before I accept that literally means figuratively just because a lot of lazy careless fucks use it that way.
@Popehat I agree but I think some of your replies here miss the point.
When we lose a precise meaning, as with "literally," and the word becomes essentially meaningless, we've lost a tool for communicating ideas.
But defending arbitrary customs like "fewer/less than" or "different from/than" is not that. It's just pedantry, which is alienating, classist, and generally a waste of time.
The point of language is to communicate and to be understood. The best way to do that is the best way to do that. Fighting the evolution of language today will go exactly as well it has in past centuries.
@msavener What communicative capacity have we lost in the cheeky usage of the 'literally' adverb? Is it something crucial? How often is it important to communicate that what one is saying should be taken as concretely true (and how hard is it to communicate that idea when "literally" is ambiguous?)
@mtomczak I mean, you kinda answered your own question there. We wouldn't need to work harder to communicate the idea of "literally" if we hadn't lost the communicative capacity attached to it.
But we've also gained the capacity to be cheeky, irreverent, and ironic with the figurative usage. Win some, lose some -- literally.
So much of these debates boil down to personal taste -- usually that of an older generation railing against change, against usages brought about by The Youth, and sometimes against usages brought about by Those People. Which is why I'm so anti-pedant.
But regardless of the reasons, occasionally there is a usage that is truly unique, like this one, that is lost in the evolution. And that singular capacity dies with it. It's happened before and it'll happen again.
Side note: It is funny to me that we admire the Germans for having so many delightful words for very specific feelings, experiences, and the like as comparable words in English are paved over or die out.
@msavener I don't think I know what was lost. Is communicating "I am speaking seriously and not figuratively" a real problem that real people have often enough to dedicate a whole four-syllable adverb to it (vs. letting that adverb get consumed by misuse to highlight how absurd that situation is)?
@mtomczak You just pointed out that literally is four syllables but then used 7 words to replace it. That's the point. "Literally" is a singular meaning -- there is no succinct replacement. If "schadenfreude" began to mean "pork knuckles," eventually you'd have to start saying "pleasure derived by someone from another person's misfortune" instead of schadenfreude.
Is that a "real problem" that "real people" have? Of course not. I never said it was. It's a linguistic argument. If you don't like those, you can simply move along instead of yucking yums, particularly if you're going to dehumanize the people engaged in them by implying they're not "real people."
@msavener How is it "yucking yums" to ask the impact of a change to speech? What is the "yum" here?
Because from context, I think the "yum" is "criticizing people who enjoy speech changing," or in other words, "yucking yums." And yeah, I'll yuck yucking yums all day long.
@mtomczak If that's the context you gleaned from this thread, you need to get your short-term memory and reading comprehension tested. Because the reply that started this thread was me standing up for natural language evolution and against pedants.
You're either choosing to ignore the points I'm trying to make, or this whole thing is in bad-faith, either of which makes this a waste of time. Bye.
@msavener You got it; I erred in reading comprehension, my apologies.
You made two distinct points with your first post (if I understand you correctly): that "literally" is transitioning towards meaninglessness and that evolution of language is an irresistible tide-like process that cannot be stopped. I became focused on your first statement and missed the nuance the subsequent statements bring.
I disagree with you on the notion that "literally" is losing its meaning (it's rather gaining another one, and the one intended can be gleaned from context; some precision is lost, but not the entire definition of the word), but that's irrelevant really if your primary point is "Language changes; get used to it." Completely agree.
