Hacker News Reader

Comment by PedroBatista | Hacker News Reader

We are in a age where most interactions are supercharged with melodramatic theatrics.

Not to dunk too much on the artistic community, but when it comes to these 4 day dramas all the over the top adjectives are applied. Very eloquent but the feelings most of the time aren't even real. It's a performance.

View on HN

Not to mention, and this is something I have to explain to my European friends all the time when they get all of their information on the US from it's media, Americans speak in hyperbole all the time. It's how they talk to each other ("omg, you're my best friend", "I almost died", "That's the biggest tower I've ever seen", "People are literally dying on the streets due to private healthcare", etc), so if you read it without the context you would think this ad is the worst thing in the world.

Side note: because literally has been so often used to mean figuratively, literally is now acceptable to mean figuratively. They even updated the definition in the dictionary: the word now means literally AND its opposite.

Yep, the dictionary's job is to tell you how people are using language, not to tell people how to use words :). And don't people love to make a mess with words' meanings?!

Literally has been used in that way for literally hundreds of years. From Charles Dickens ("He had literally feasted his eyes on the culprit.") and Charlotte Bronte ("Literally I was the apple of his eye"), to Mark Twain (in Adventures of Tom Sawyer) and F. Scott Fitzgerald (in The Great Gatsby) -- among others.

This "Literally shouldn't be used figuratively" is a rather modern construct that was artificially created.

No, literally is not acceptable to use to mean figuratively. Those people are using the word wrong. The dictionaries acting like this is ok should be ashamed of themselves.

> "omg, you're my best friend", "I almost died", "That's the biggest tower I've ever seen", "People are literally dying on the streets due to private healthcare", etc

One of these things is not like the others~...

None of those statements has anything in common, beyond their hyperbolic status. That's literally the point.

I'm not even sure that this is true. How many people have actually interacted with somebody who is overreacting here?

Instead, the overreactions are aggregated via social media and news coverage so we can see "wow look at all these people using extreme language here."

Manufactured outrage. Designed to entice clickbait farmers to spread the word. Gone are the days of blasting millions into a TV ad. No new age ad gets that attention anymore. Instead, the idea is to go viral.

Apple knows exactly what it's doing (or whatever marketing company they paid to do this). And they did get viral, so mission accomplished?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com