https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daylight_saving_time
I mean, “Daylight savings time” is a commonly used term. At some point it just becomes accepted as a valid alternative.
I mean, “Daylight savings time” is a commonly used term. At some point it just becomes accepted as a valid alternative.
Irregardless, "daylight saving time" is the only cromulent term, we must stop embiggening peoples' vocabularies with alot of fake words!
I see what you did there.
I get it, sort of. In that case I just tell myself "it's hyperbole for lazy people" and move on. "Could care less", though, that one I cannot reconcile.
That is, no one is saying "I am literally dying to know" to try to communicate the fact that they are not, in fact, dying to know. Instead, the difference between "I am dying to know" and "I am literally dying to know" is one of emphasis. The second is almost perfectly equivalent to "I am really dying to know" or "I am very much dying to know".
By contrast, "I am figuratively dying to know" would imply that you are specifically not dying to know, which everyone understands perfectly well.
What have I just said?
If only we had a word whose express purpose was to avoid ambiguity for those times when it matters to communicate without ambiguity...
These are all literal meanings of insane. Of course, if we add figurative meanings we can increase the ambiguity further.
However, your criticism applies similarly to words like "truly" - if I say "that is truly insane", do I mean that it is insane in one of the literal senses of the word? Or the figurative uses? Am I just emphasizing either of these meanings, or do I feel a need to confirm that I am not lying?
Either way we take it, though, "literally" can never be replaced with "figuratively" without altering the meaning of a phrase. In it's use as an intensifier, it does NOT mean "figuratively", it means "very".
Also, looking on Merriam-Webster, they clearly discuss this and reach the same conclusion. They also mention that this meaning for emphasis appears as early as the 18th century, in the works of Charlotte Brontë, James Joyce, Mark Twain.
What have I just said?
If the context is that it's been a handful of minutes, we don't say my usage is wrong; we definitely don't say that "sometimes days means minutes" and fret about how anyone will communicated time. We say that sometimes people exaggerate.
You can still object, if you wish, on stylistic grounds. You can object that you'd prefer we keep "literally" apart from some standard uses of words lest we allow inappropriate ambiguity. But none of that means anyone is using "literally" to mean "figuratively".
(I’m also wishing the horde off my lawn but they may have already won.)
I'd love for one of them to show the original centuries old definition of English that they are prescribing from.
Or put another way, if the prescriptive view is nothing but a descriptive view of language from a few decades back then essentially you have a descriptive view that tries to ignore that time isn't constant.
Having a standard to hold our selves to is not having a prescriptive approach to language. Prescriptive language is what the French do. They have a government office that decides the official rules of French and official documents have to follow them. For example, even though everyone calls a Computer a Computer pretty much everywhere in the world with variation on spelling, the French government has to call it an ordinateur.
The point of language is to facilitate communication. To do so there needs to be a standard. You don't have to legally enforce it, it should be voluntary. Freedom of speech and all that. But I reject the copout that "language evolves, deal with it".
Yup. Some of us do so quite consciously and intentionally, and knowing it is doomed to fail -- so, if you will, quixotically[1].
"Why on Earth would you want to do that?", I hear you ask. I'm glad you did -- let me explain: It's a delaying defence, intended to slow down the enem^W speed of change. We see that slowing down as a good thing, because it increases intelligibility over time. You, as a speaker of English, can with some effort read and understand Shakespeare and (hiss rough contemporary) the King James translation of the Bible... But not much further back; Chaucer is a struggle, and Beowulf just gibberish to you. Icelanders, OTOH, have no more problems with the Viking sagas, written down about the time of Chaucer, than you do with Shakespeare; and had they any litterature written down in the time of Beowulf, I'd imagine it would be no worse for them than Chaucer is for you. To Swedes, on the other other hand, the writings of Gustav II Adolf (not to mention the chronicles of his grandfather Gustaf I Vasa's historian) are Chaucer-level difficult even though they're from about the time of Shakespeare (or less than a century before); actual Chaucer-era writings like the medieval laws of king Magnus are Beowulf-level gibberish; nineteenth-century poetry -- heck, even the 1917 Bible or the prose of Strindberg, who IIRC died just a few years before that translation! -- seem to be as hard to grasp as Shakespeare is to you.
And this shit seems to just be accelerating; kids nowadays have a hard time not just with Strindberg, but with novels I enjoyed in my youth -- written in the 1940s, -60s, or even later! So, in the hope that my grandkids (if ever I have any) will understand what the heck I'm saying to them and I what they're telling me, I fight this hopeless rearguard action, willingly sacrificing myself to the slings and arrows of mindlessly laissez-faire anti-prescriptivists for the greater good of mankind.
So slowing Swedish down to the rate of decay--eh, development -- of English is my primary goal. But, hey, while I'm at it anyway, why not try to improve the cross-time communication power of English, too?
There, hope that answers your questions?
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[1]: Except I guess the Knight of La Mancha didn't know that last bit. Unless, I guess, if you want to argue that deep down he really had to know that all along.
I asked where, exactly, the words we have came from?
In Slovakia we have laws giving a certain public institution the responsibility to define what are the proper rules to use the language, including maintaining the dictionary of all the allowed words and their meanings.
Anything beyond that (with the exception of e.g. scientific terms) is objectively incorrect slovak.
Humans create languages. And they constantly change and evolve, including new words, letters, grammar, etc. Consider Old English versus Modern English [0]. Or even software companies that have become nouns or verbs in common parlance (e.g. "to google").