
Semantic Drift - drjohnson
https://harpers.org/archive/2019/08/semantic-drift/
======
ZeroGravitas
> “Literally” now means “really".

Amusing to see my main argument against "literally" pedants being used
directly in the complaint of one.

"Really", "truly", "actually", "absolutely" and a bunch of other similar words
should literally indicate the same thing as literally, that something is
"real", "true", "actual" as opposed to "metaphorical" or otherwise exagerrated
but now all have that meaning faded to just emphasis.

If you can accept that then there's no real reason to not accept literally
going the same way. If anything "literally" is a lot weaker a claim than
"really" or "truly" yet "really killed last night" or "truly shocking" get a
pass where "literally" wouldn't.

Plus the other main use of "literally" is "look out, here comes a clever pun",
which even as a fan of puns I'm not sure is a great loss.

~~~
fhars
Of course the author is playing with the very things she criticises, and other
people’s linguistic peeves. Just look at how she ends the article on a split
infinitive.

~~~
ZeroGravitas
I'm not so sure. She does specifically mention that one earlier as a
convention she doesn't care about or follow and does seem to wrestle with her
own knowledge that the things she does care about are basically pointless, but
still takes them seriously.

English is so confusing you can easily read too much into it (eg. was she
intentionally playing with the dual meanings of abysmal (terrible vs deep)? I
don't think so, but couldn't swear to it.

~~~
fhars
Well, she explicitly says that the question of split infinitives leaves her
„nonplussed“, which I read as a deliberate play.

~~~
arrrg
That’s an obvious joke but it’s right in the middle of a section about things
she is ok with but the generation prior to her wasn’t. It would be bad writing
if she weren’t actually serious about those things.

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coldtea
> _“Literally” now means “really,” or, worse, “figuratively.” (Anyone claiming
> that “my head literally exploded” would not have lived to tell the tale.)_

Now "now", since centuries. Get on with the program. Several other words are
their own antonyms, including "dust" (to clean up dust or add dust),
"oversight" (to supervise, but also the result of lack of supervision), "clip"
(attach but also cut off), etc.

~~~
arrrg
Acting as if context doesn’t exist is repeating weird motif of this genre of
dignified dusty outrage.

Using these words in a context where the context doesn’t make its meaning
clear is a bad, sure, but other usage is quite unproblematic.

~~~
coldtea
Plus, even the context-free use allows for interesting puns, non-committal
("diplomatic") responses, and so on.

If all words had that problem, sure it would be bad. But some words needing
extra context to disambiguate is not a real problem (nor a new phenomenon).

In fact we even have it in parsers, where it helps to make syntax lighter and
more pleasant (at the cost of complicating the parsing rule).

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riffraff
As a non native speaker, my biggest gripe is that words which meanth the same
thing have diverged.

For example, "egregiously" meant "very well" and "egregiamente" still does in
Italian. But in English, it now means "very badly".

At the same time, people who spend a lot of time using English end up
reimporting words with the same root into my own language when we already have
something (e.g. the word spelled "decade" in Italian means "ten things" while
the semantically equivalent "ten years" is "decennio", but some people will
now commonly use the former to mean the latter because they just mock English)

~~~
jacques_chester
Latin words mostly came to English through Norman French after William the
Conqueror and his followers became ruling class in 1066. In the intervening
thousand years there was a lot of time for the meanings to diverge and invert.

English is particularly rich in false friends and loanwords because of its
hybrid origins. Only recently has it begun to export words back out to other
languages (eg. "le weekend").

~~~
empath75
Actually quite a lot of the Latin and Greek words came several centuries after
the Norman invasion as renaissance scholars introduced them — often to
‘correct’ French words. Then quite a lot more came through scientific terms in
the industrial era.

~~~
jacques_chester
Yes, I should've mentioned them rather than sweeping it all under loanwords.

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charles_f
Relates to the usual debate of whether the language ought to remain in the
form that was crystallized at a given moment, or accept the transformation
contemporary users are making.

I used to not care, but having read some Chomsky lately, it seems that some of
those semantics transformations are made to serve an agenda - and now I feel
that battling for stability has some sense.

Kind of like trying to use the language as the unit for ideas, you might want
to have the language as a stable reference frame so that everyone understands
those ideas.

~~~
afiori
> Relates to the usual debate of whether the language ought to remain in the
> form that was crystallized at a given moment, or accept the transformation
> contemporary users are making.

That is a false dichotomy in my opinion. If you see language as a tool then
the most relevant characteristic is not stability of fluidity, but usefulness.
Language changes because we are (subtly) using is differently, some of these
changes are sometimes actually many different competing mutations or are just
born out of "I need a new word for this".

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kbutler
Hear, hear!

Although I'm a curmudgeon at heart, I'm trying to help my children internalize
the fact that "correct" language evolves. Learn the right meaning, syntax,
pronunciation, and idioms so you don't sound uneducated, but realize that
people may differ in their perception of "correct" or acceptable.

"Be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others."
(Comma-splice noted)

~~~
CharlesW
I just had a similar conversation with my daughter about the entomology of a
word that you would never use today, but was in relatively common use when I
was a kid. It's kind of amazing how (living) languages mutate.

~~~
saghm
Normally I wouldn't ask, but since it's related to the topic at hand, did you
mean to pull a [https://xkcd.com/1012/](https://xkcd.com/1012/)?

~~~
CharlesW
Ha! No, but thank you for the smile. (For folks who didn't catch it, I meant
to say "etymology".)

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gniv
That was fun to read. I’m happy she mentioned nonplussed since, as a non-
native speaker, I never quite grasped its meaning. Now I understand why.

~~~
hodgesrm
Wait until you try to use "sanction" (especially as a verb, where the
different meanings are close to opposite). [1] The verb "table" is another one
with opposite meanings. [2]

The English language appears designed to foil friend and foe alike.

[1] [https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/sanction](https://www.merriam-
webster.com/dictionary/sanction)

[2] [https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/table](https://www.merriam-
webster.com/dictionary/table)

~~~
marcosdumay
The dual meaning of sanction seems to be on every language that imported it
from Latin. I imagine is remotes to the Romans.

Anyway, both meanings are a positive administrative act, where an executive
does the thing he usually does. The different meanings usually don't mix on
the same context.

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Gimpei
Reminds me of how nonplussed has been redefined to mean the opposite of its
original meaning. Fine for the language to evolve but we need to stop that
sort of thing. It's super confusing now whenever someone uses nonplussed.
Which meaning are they using?

~~~
taneq
Yeah, sadly most people could care less and it’s literally the worst.

~~~
antisemiotic
_comprised of_

~~~
taneq
_supposably_ comprised of.

~~~
nerdponx
Definately.

~~~
dredmorbius
I get that alot.

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stoksc
Lay/laid as their ‘descent to barbarism’ makes me scared what they’d say about
me..

~~~
333c
The whole article is a little hyperbolic, but the distinction is important. To
"lie" is to position one's own self, while to "lay" is to position some
grammatical object. Confusingly, "I will lay myself down" is grammatically
correct, because "myself" serves as the object.

There are situations in which using the wrong verb conveys a different
meaning. "Please lie down on the floor" is a request to put yourself
horizontally on the floor, while "please lay down on the floor" is a request
to spread soft feathers underfoot.

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danieltillett
"Racist" and "Nazi" are headed the same way. This frustrates the hell out of
me as these are both terms that should be used for the highest level of
condemnation, not something to just smear your political opponents.

~~~
ZeroGravitas
I'm the opposite, "Nazis" seem to have turned into saturday morning cartoon
villains, who sneeringly laugh as they plan to destroy the world, and one-off
aberations that can never happen again rather than rather fairly standard
fascists who got a whole bunch of people killed in the usual way that fascists
do.

But I am reading "It Can't Happen Here" right now, so maybe I'm biased by
that. It's certainly confusing reading a book written in 1935 that talks about
the Nazis without full knowledge of what was to follow and think "this could
be taken straight from today" as well as realising that it wasn't even extreme
satire at the time, but rather mostly based on Huey Long and other real
figures.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It_Can%27t_Happen_Here](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It_Can%27t_Happen_Here)

Wow, reading that wikipedia article I'm amazed to find out the sci-fi
television series V started out as an adaptation of It Can't Happen Here.

Mind. Blown.

~~~
danieltillett
I think we are actually in agreement.

"It can't happen here" was written after the rise of the Nazis so it not that
surprising that it appears prescient. The same forces that gave rise to the
Nazis in Germany were present in many countries in 1935 including the USA.

Looking to the past can be very dangerous. Yes it helps to know history, but
the conditions that gave rise to Nazism were conditional on the time. History
can lead us astray and cause us worry about things that don't really matter
and miss the new things that do.

~~~
lovemenot
>> so it not that surprising that it appears precedent.

prescient, right?

Usually I would not have bothered, but given the context...

~~~
danieltillett
Yes. Forgive me I am in Australia tapping away on my iPad and it is getting
late :)

~~~
lovemenot
No worries. And thank you Australia for bringing that expression to our
language.

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steve_taylor
> “He means _fewer_ water” or “She means _less_ bottles.”

This is wrong. “Fewer” is for quantities (i.e. countable things) whereas
“less” is for a singular mass.

~~~
nerdponx
Apparently this was never a rule except in textbooks, like splitting
infinitives, ending sentences with prepositions, typesetting ordinal suffixes
("th" etc) in superscript, and always putting punctuation inside of quotation
marks.

~~~
333c
I'm confused what you mean. As a native speaker, these are definitely rules.
As your parent comment says (missing the sarcasm of the article), these
examples sound (and are) wrong.

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PeterStuer
Now imagine being a non-native English speaker brought up on an all-you-can-
eat regime of cultural imperialist dishes but outside of the y'all-o-sphere.
Should we follow down the 'Ow my balls' rabbit hole or just bifurcate?

~~~
skrebbel
I imagine that maybe this was the point, but I'm a non-native English speaker
and I do not understand a single part of your comment.

~~~
hanoz
I'm a native English speaker, and I don't either.

~~~
mrob
Translation:

>all-you-can-eat regime of cultural imperialist dishes

American movies/TV/books etc. written by skilled professionals with formal
English education.

>the y'all-o-sphere

Casual English users with no idea what a direct object is.

>the 'Ow my balls' rabbit hole

A world like the movie "Idiocracy", where a TV show about hitting people in
the balls is considered highbrow entertainment.

>or just bifurcate?

Or risk becoming incomprehensible to the masses.

~~~
PeterStuer
What can I say. Humour does not appear to be one of my talents. Thanks for the
translation though. Spot on.

~~~
JetezLeLogin
I found it compactly hilarious.

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lonelappde
Article has an autoplay video absolutely-positio oned ad where the close
button is so tiny that clicking on loads the ad page instead of closing.

Article has a second fly out ad after you start scrolling.

Article has a fixed layout with tiny font.

