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.”
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.
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?”
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.
I don’t care what the original creator said. Gif is pronounced Gif, and peanut butter is peanut butter.
Thankfully it was named after the peanut butter and given a nice slogan to boot so you always know how to pronounce it properly!
I did a college paper circa 2000 on what a meme was before memes became memes. Which rather ironically, the concept of a meme originally was an idea that spreads and becomes an actual thing through person to person social transference, like what the word meme means currently. It’s like describing the back to the future plot lines.
