Ok ok… I’ll be the one…
“Wrongly”
no worries I’ll use it the wrongliest
You can always go wrongliester!
Good wrongliesterness.
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.”
Tastes real goodly.
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.
Playly not nice.
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.
no, it can’t. hyperbole means to exaggerate, to a great degree. descriptors like “round” or “soft” can’t be hyperbolic.
Calling fat people round is hyperbole isn’t it?
Or calling a bald guy “Curly”
It really depends on how they are built. I have deffo seen some rounder obese people.
no, it’s either true or false, but even a false usage isn’t hyperbolic, it’s just wrong
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.
Did that literally happen?
Or has actual fallen foul of another meaning change too now?
It’s a definition in Merriam-Webster as of several years ago.
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.
There were a lot more langauges on those isles long before and during the [still ongoing] development of english, and during the empire connecting to more of the world more than any other in history… so, not so insular during its development.
My pet example is Americans and “ironically/unironically”.
Please don’t do this to me
Literally.
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”)
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.”
Mine is electrocuted which means to die or get executed by electricity but people say “the person got electrocuted and is recovering in the hospital”.
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.
Well. Sort of.
Some terminology is better defined by how the relevant experts use it. It’s singular and precise definition is required for any useful dialogue. If 99% of people call a kidney a liver but doctors call it a kidney its a kidney.
Some terminology evolves and is used differently by different groups. Sometimes the more illiterate group flattens the language by removing nuance or even entirely removing a concept from a language with no replacement. Arguably both definitions may be common usage but one is worse and using it means you are.
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…
yet they aren’t out there blowing on dicks or trying to force air up urethras… Hopefully…
I see you don’t regularly read the sex forums and questions on reddit.
Hopes dashed. It’s not common, but there are some people who have the right combination of circumstances to make them think blowjobs involve the movement of air.
I feel like people forget that words can have multiple definitions. You can have a technical definition and a popular definition
And homonyms.
Ad hominem.
And I’m still gonna bitch about it if they’ve reduced the usefulness of a word due to habitual misuse!
But do you mean literally everyone or literally everyone?
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 think they were joking about the fact that the meaning of ‘literally’ has changed in the common vernacular to mean ‘figuratively’
I mean this i show it literally works, right?
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 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”.
“Literally” only holds the opposite meaning when used as a hyperbole.
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
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.
Do you mean Disk, or Disc?
Both spellings are accepted to designate the mathematical object. I think it’s mostly a UK vs US spelling but please don’t quote me on that.
EDIT just realised I missed the opportunity to answer with the extremely unhelpful mathematician response: “yes”
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.
Civilians can’t just come in and start stealing jargon words and apply their own non-jargon meanings.
This is (literally) one of the more insane takes I’ve ever seen about language. You want jargon to apply only as jargon meaning in all contexts? Lay usage aside, what about when two fields of study use the same word? Battle royale to see who gets to keep it?
Obviously you look into the literature to see who has the first claim, and they get to keep it. The others have to edit and re-print the entirety of the corpus.
Sounds reasonable to me.
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.
A writer once put the letter ‘s’ in ‘eiland’ in order to make the word look more Latin. This, despite the fact that the word ‘island’ has no Latin roots. It caught on and now that is the proper spelling of ‘island’ and you’d be a fool to try to force people to spell it ‘eiland’.
English is used by the unwashed masses and trying to get it to adhear to strict rules or not change will be as effective as trying to stop a flood by holding out your hand.
English was not exactly right when you were born with the spelling of ‘island’ and was wrong hundreds of years ago with ‘eiland’, nor is it wrong that dumb means stupid instead of mute, or literally can be used to mean figuratively.
Gif þū ne sacast for eftcyme to Eald Englisc, þonne is hit līcnessēocnes tō sacanne þæt sprǣc ne mæg wrixlan.
is Tire Iron, the same as Tyre Lever?
Looks like a stethoscope to me.
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.
That’s odd
Well yes it is to me too seeing as that abuse was not made, to my knowledge at least, in my native language.
But then I thought, “well if there is a crescendo, unless it goes on forever, there will be a climax”. So I kinda get where the abuse (or misunderstanding, or literary license, or whatever the intent is) comes from. I don’t, personally, agree with it, so won’t use it that way. But whatever I personally think is irrelevant, at least now I am aware someone might mean that. So I guess now, in English at least, it’s been long enough and widespread enough it’s no longer an abuse (colloquially speaking)
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.
Interesting! TIL
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?
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?”
Words aren’t “endangered”. There are literally an infinite number of potential words, if we need to reinvent a meaning, we can quite easily(see: synonym). Further, the original meanings still exist. You can still use “awful” to mean “inspiring awe” and you’re correct, you just won’t be understood.
This guy is trying to mop up the beach every time the tide comes in.
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.
Those words are already lost.
Holy shit, that’s good
It uses figurative language instead of the literal meaning of words so it’s complete nonsense.
For all intensive purposes, the meaning of words matters less than how we use it. Irregardless of how we decimate it’s meaning, so long as we get the point across there is no need to nip it in the butt. Most people could care less.
::glares:: Well done. 😆
I will hunt you for sport.
YeS, YoUrE rIgHt. aS lOnG aS tHe mEaNiNg iS uNdErStOod, iT dOeS NoT mAtTeR.
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 hate you.
Definately!
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.
Gets my brain scrambling for what caring less than zero could be.
Negative care…
Turtles.
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.
Cow shit’s not that bad.
Don’t tell me that’s bullshit.
I have walked in that shit, slipped in that shit, I have even fallen in that shit. Cow shit smells and tastes just as bad as the finest Bull shit. And that bullshit is mixed into that cow shit and the two can’t be separated. No matter how hard you try. And I ain’t dealing with any shit anymore for whatever time is left of my life.
But, I do like drinking my Daily Duck Shit. I have a cup of it right now. I love drinking my Daily Duck Shit and I always try to keep it on hand.
****For those that aren’t fairly deep into Chinese Oolong teas, Duck Shit, “Ya Shi Xiang”, is type of Dan-Cong Oolong tea. You can google Duck Shit tea and get at least one origin story. They are fun stories.
Try pig 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. 😅
Its obviously a joke.
But maybe you understood that and your comment is sarcastic as well. So now I am the one being woooshed.
🥸
Is… is your reply sarcastic too? How far does this sarcasm uncertainuum go?
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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.
The word that always comes to mind is ‘literally’ which has come to mean ‘figuratively, but with emphasis’ and it drives me nuts - because it removes the word we have to say ‘this is a thing that you might assume is figurative, but it’s not, it actually happened’.
Allow me to introduce you to my favorite portmanteau, “legiterally”
Okay, that’s actually kinda great.
I was going to be that one in my list but I literally hate using the word …. 😉
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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.”
Nimrod in the X-Men was badass. Probably more fitting to the original definition of the word.
-
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.
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Memes are supposed to be funny
That’s not true, which is exactly why this is a good meme. The word meme was originally coined as a conceptual analogue to the word "gene*. Ideas spread and evolve, just like genes. Only in the last 15 years or so has it come to mean internet joke, and this is the direct result of people using the word in a different way than it was intended to be used. It doesn’t matter what word the OP had in mind when they made this meme (though gif is the most likely candidate), it’s accurate and relevant.
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Oh, so you just don’t even understand the meme, now I get why you’re so upset! I recommend starting by reading the words left-to-right, top-to-bottom. If you don’t know how to pronounce one, just do your best. You can also ask an adult to help you, if there’s one nearby.
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Monosodium glutamate isn’t even that long, what a weenie
¿ Por Que No Los Dos ?
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I don’t see the backside of Morpheus’ head.
Should look like that:
i think he is looking at the meme which you are inside
Just realised there’s a gun pointed to Neo’s head in both images
Can I have some more pixels please
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April I have more pixels please
June I have more pixels please.<- period
I don’t know, june you?
Just June?
Not every month?
Would you mind providing us a few more pixels? Only if it is no trouble o’course.
/j
I’ve allready to rite we’ll, but than my conscious sad, “For get the rules,” so I let my lose ideals led me. I’m two stubborn to accept that I should of staid in school.
I think I had a stroke reading this.
Yes, but you understood it eventually, so you can’t criticize it.
Understanding something eventually isn’t the same as understanding it immediately. The latter is necessary for effective communication. I don’t have the brain power or neurotype to decipher a text like I would if it were latin.
I’m not saying that you should shut up if you genuinely can’t help it. That’s ok. I’ll figure it out. We can both communicate with each other to the best of our abilities and I won’t mind at all.
But if you can, you should try to be considerate. If you think you spending slightly less time on it is worth me having to spend much more time on understanding it, I find that to be a dick move and I won’t give you the time of day forever.
All in good fun.
My arms were too short to reach.
Languages are living things. And living things always change. Note the Great English Vowel Change. Even the Norwegian my Grandfather spoke and that I learned from him was virtually a dead language that modern Norwegians stopped using in the 1850s. And the English spoken in the UK is different than the American English I speak. Spanish spoken in Spain isn’t the same as someone from Mexico speaks.
And when conversing with someone, (in the language of your choice), the words you choose to use are defined by the context you use them in. Words can have multiple meanings, but it’s the context and tone clarifies those meanings. Consider all the meanings of the single word ‘fuck’.
But problems start with written words. And many people have poor written communication skills. It can be hard to parse meaning from poorly written words because there is little context and tone that comes through with a typed sentence.
We are all just baying at the moon like any pack. And hoping some understands us.
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.
