Hacker News Reader

Comment by SquareWheel | Hacker News Reader

    Reddit now literally powers the generation of news cycles across the blogerverse.

I didn't know Reddit had their own power plant.

View on HN

Is that a joke, or are you unfamiliar with the many definitions of power?

It was a joke (a bad one, clearly), but it was at the definition of the word literally. The OP presumably meant figuratively.

The OP is fine. You're being overly pedantic. People have been using the word this way for (literally) hundreds of years.

Moreover, the truly literal definition of the word is from the Latin for "letter" and means something like "letter-for-letter truth." So using this word to describe anything other than a written document is "wrong" on some level. But language doesn't really work that way.

Using a different definition of the word power doesn't make it any less literal.

Google "definition literally". It's depressing, but that's the way the cookie bounces: language mutates, for better and for worse.

    "Used to acknowledge that something is not literally true but is used for emphasis or to express strong feeling."

Well that just makes me sad. We don't really have another word to use in its stead, do we?

You could say "for all intents and purposes" or "practically".

Reply on news.ycombinator.com