OTOH decimation actually was devastating, the idea that it just means "lose 10% of" really undersells the process of punishing a large group of your army by dividing them into groups of 10 and forcing each group to choose one at random and then the other 9 murder them by stoning.
I think words like “ironic” and “literal” have a lot of staying power, even if they have seceded a little ground on informal use. There will always need to be a case when it’s important to disambiguate how ironic one is being. Irony is often made clear by over-exaggeration or stock phrases (eg “/s”, eye dialect “you guise”), but sincerity can be made unambiguously clear with a term such as “unironic”, which is often avoided in irony to keep things clear
Obviously this begs the question of if someone were to use “unironic” ironically, but outside of being used in rare cases of hyper-irony, the only use I can think of this misdirection is to be purposefully malicious. So even without prescriptivism, I believe that irony (at least as made clear in “I was being ironic”) is a word one that is very hard to kill.
If I say "oh man, I literally die every time someone complains about people using literally wrong", I am clearly using hyperbole... no one is being confused, and I am not changing the meaning of a word.
Do people think we are going to ruin accurate measurements when I say something like, "this thing weighs a ton!" when the item clearly weighs a lot less than 2000 pounds?
I’m more curious what word will come up to take on the old role of ‘literally’ when ‘literally’ becomes purely an intensifier.
The problem is Godelesque. There's no way to form a consistent language that includes lies.
I contend that this isn't a thing. It's absolutely the case that "literally" is often used when the sentence is figurative, but for it to mean "figuratively" it would have to be the intent of the speaker that the inclusion of "literally" makes the utterance more likely to be understood as figurative. I think it is instead used as an intensifier.
All of that said, I don't have any principled objection to protest against it on stylistic grounds. I just think we should try and be clear about what's going on. (And I recognize that I'm disagreeing, here, with at least one dictionary - I believe they got it wrong.)
Next let's debate what "hopefully" means.
Let me guess, you literally did that unironically?
I always thought that the perfect example of irony would be to write a song about irony in which you use a bunch of examples that aren't ironic... but that's just me.
I learned to read and write in the 1970s and 1980s and misusing "they" in a singular context would result in a red mark on one's paper and a lower grade.
Any time I read a sentence that uses "they" as a singular it's a small mental roadblock. It's like stumbling on a displaced brick in a sidewalk. If I read "a good programmer will work to understand the problem they are trying to solve" I will mentally trip over that and be distracted from the point being made.
If I don't know whether my subject is a male or a female person, I will use "he" as the singular. "A good programmer will work to understand the problem he is trying to solve."
I learned that "he" refers to a male or is neutral, but don't mind when writers use "she" as long as they are consistent about it. In a paragraph about the habits of a good programmer, flipping from "he" to "she" every other sentence is also distracting.
Also OK if the writer avoids the issue: "Good programmers will work to understand the problems they are trying to solve."
Yes I realize that the usage of "they" has evolved, as language does, but for me it's hard-coded in ROM at this point.
Cheer up! English has it easy in this respect — although I'll readily grant that it is even easier in elliptical languages that usually omit gender specific references altogether, like Japanese.
In Dutch it will be an uphill battle to get a singular 'hen/hun' accepted.
Gender-neutral semantically-singular “they” has always been widely used in English (including by highly regarded professional writers, as well as in common speech and writing), though it experienced a period of disfavor in academic circles starting from the period for the Victorian prescriptivists and just starting to fade recently.
However, I wonder what pronoun do you use when you want to refer to a single person whose gender you know but don't want to reveal. Occasionally this is done in storytelling so as not to give away the identity of a character. Or more commonly, I use the word "they" when talking about someone I know to someone else whose gender is irrelevant. For example, I might say to my dad that I will be going out with a friend who happens to be a girl but I'll use "they" because I don't want to have to deal with the inevitable reaction from him that I'm seeing a new girlfriend. I realise that without the word "they", I would have other options but I wonder if you take this particular usage into account when you talk about defaulting to "he" or "she"?
This advice seems pretty questionable to me. It seems evident that neither 'he' nor 'she' are actually neutral. Even if one accepts that they can be used with that intent, they still colour ones perception of the person in the minds eye.
I'd be interested to know which pronouns you use in speech when the gender of the target is unknown. For example in the following cases:
- A baby whose gender you don't know
- A pet whose gender you don't know
- Someone who has been referred to in conversation (perhaps someone talking about "my friend") whose gender you don't know.