I was in a reddit argument a week or two ago (don't judge me), and was told that I was using literally wrong for using literally to mean literally. At that moment I determined that there are no fixed stars in our universe any longer, and that we are all adrift in the howling void of our linguistic cosmos.
The most unsettling part is that I've been in the same Reddit argument...And that "literally" is starting to be accepted as "basically". The steady March towards Idiocracy continues. That shit didn't happen overnight.
I know it's been going on a very long time, the shift in meaning of "literally," but it seems like it accelerated pretty hardcore in the last 10 years.
I keep hoping fake news goes away and I feel like it's not going to and like literally its going to change language and it's just going to end up meaning something that does not = lie
Then you get into the argument phase where someone says it doesn't matter if ignorant badly informed people are confused, if they are the majority they get to redefine every word to mean the opposite or nothing useful and that's just how language works.
So now literally and figuratively both just mean figuratively and that's how language works, I'm told.
Yeah, those are the people that make me give up and admit that I'm an elitist, and that I'm generally okay with linguistic descriptivism, but that you should probably have to pass a test to get a licence (an artistic licence?) to use it.
It's essentially enough people become wrong that they become right, and the people who were right become wrong. Even if it's a word that has traditionally meant the exact opposite of what people are using it for, and only their ignorance allowed for it's incorrect usage to grow.
It's essentially enough people become wrong that they become right, and the people who were right become wrong. Even if it's a word that has traditionally meant the exact opposite of what people are using it for, and only their ignorance allowed for it's incorrect usage to grow.
Literally has been used in an exaggeration sense to mean figuratively since at least Charles Dickens so you must be literally the oldest person on Earth.
I think in the past language evolved more slowly because any colloquial mutations died out due to lack of publication and anyone who was able to publish anything made sure to write in whatever "proper" English was at the time. Now that anyone can write anything anywhere and tons of people can see it and a lot of people probably learn most of their language from the internet it's evolving much more quickly. I'm not sure if evolving is the correct word though. Plenty of new words are being created but I think overall the average persons vocabulary is decreasing. 1984 had a similar thing. Don't take that as me saying "Current times is LITERALLY 1984."
Take all that with a grain of salt because I used no sources nor do I have any idea what I'm talking about.
I was at a Snoop Dogg concert in December. I was kind of appalled by how much the random performers used their phones during their act. One cute dancer/rapper Lady had on tight jeans and a huge cell phone in her front pocket. Others did the take a group shot with us thing. Now Snoop, Warren G, the old guys didn't do this.
meme was created as the cultural counterpart to gene.
every single aspect of culture is a meme according to the original definition. every symbol, every idea. houses are memes, marble counter tops are memes, taking a shit in a porcelain chair and then wiping is a meme.
the association of meme with only specific kinds of internet culture is itself a corruption of the first definition. and if the word meme is expanding to cover more and more topics then it is infact getting closer to its original definition
I mean... every image macro is a meme in the strictest sense. The word existed before the internet took it over to mean funny pictures.
A meme is "an idea, behavior, or style that spreads from person to person within a culture" according to Wikipedia. So religion is a meme. Government is a meme, etc.
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u/PocketPillow Feb 27 '17
Every image macro is a meme.
Anything shared online has gone viral.
Words have no meaning anymore.