this post was submitted on 03 Oct 2023
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It's not that the word "literally" is worse now. It's that it used to represent an idea (the idea of a thing being non-figurative) which it's slowly coming to not mean anymore.
Words map to meanings. Those mappings can shift and change over time. But if that happening leaves a particular meaning orphaned then I'd think of that as unfortunate, no?
Maybe instead of changes being "good" or "bad" it's more like "this shift in language increases (or decreases) the total expressiveness of the language". Would you be less up in arms at that way of putting it?
Here's a fantastic example: sentient, sapient, and concious. These are VERY different words with wildly different meanings, but they're practically treated as synonyms in colloquial usage. The only way to properly express them now is to use their entire definitions, and then people question why you're being so specific or excluding certain things.
What if you just think of it as our culture putting less emphasis on the concept of “literally” and more on “figuratively”. And the evolution actually makes the language more expressive, given the things that we’re trying to express (on average).
I don't follow... By adding the antonym you actually make it harder to express these figurative things in the same way removing contrast from an image makes it harder to resolve, so it's less expressive than before.
I don't agree that it decreased the total expressiveness of English, no. The modern colloquial use of "literally" is not identical to "figuratively", or to "very", or any other word I can think of - it's an intensifier with a unique connotation that doesn't have any good alternative. At worst, we have lost some expressiveness and gained some expressiveness, and there is no objective metric to decide whether that's a "net positive" or a "net negative"; it's just a change.