this post was submitted on 19 Dec 2023
706 points (97.8% liked)
internet funeral
6881 readers
95 users here now
ㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤart of the internet
What is this place?
• !hmmm@lemmy.world with text and titles
• post obscure and surreal art with text
• nothing memetic, nothing boring
• unique textural art images
• Post only images or gifs (except for meta posts)
Guidlines
• no video posts are allowed
• No memes. Not even surreal ones. Post your memes on !surrealmemes@sh.itjust.works instead
• If your submission can be posted to !hmmm@lemmy.world (I.e. no text images), It should be posted there instead
This is a curated magazine. Post anything and everything. It will either stay up or be lost into the void.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Merriam Webster is a descriptive dictionary. They don't tell you how words "should" be used, they say how words are used.
Using literally as an intensifier goes back literal centuries. The earliest written citation we've found of that usage goes back to 1769. It can be found everywhere from Dickens to Brontë.
It's also hardly the first word to go on a similar path towards becoming an intensifier. Very originally meant "genuine", really meant "in fact", absolutely meant "completely", etc.
But who complains about sentences like "I was really bored to death", or "I was absolutely rooted to the ground"? Does saying "it's very cold" just mean "it is a genuine fact that it is cold"?
Literally still means what it means. You can't use literally to mean "yellow", for example. People aren't generally confused when they come across the word.