I think people who think that know more pedants than linguistics and either confuse the former for the latter, or when they meet a real linguist, the linguist’s questions sound on first glance like the pedant’s ones they are uses to. But I have no empirical data to prove my point
I feel like the pedant would be instead bossing others around, with a “you mean that you «fell into» a hole”. Or perhaps voicing useless trivia, like “fun fact: some people say «fell in a hole»! The more you know~”.
In the meantime, the linguist doing this (from anecdotal evidence, I’d say that plenty do it) is motivated by curiosity, not trying to show off; in spirit he’s the same as “that kid” who disassembles objects to understand how they work, it’s just that the curiosity comes off in the wrong situation.
Having a “remainder day” is weird, but it’s hard to avoid. It really sucks that 365 doesn’t divide nicely into much at all. 5 and 73 are the only non-trivial answers. five 73 day months? Can’t even call it a month at that point.
There’s always a remainder day, and it’s not precisely 24 hours. That’s why we have leap years and sometimes leap seconds. You could get rid of that by cramming all of the time into one day of varying length. This year, maybe it’s 29.75 hours. Maybe next year it’s 31. Astronomers and physicists could fight it out and see how closely they can match the previous year.
May as well embrace the weird, cuz we dont orbit in exactly 365 days anyway. So theres gonna be leap year type adjustments anyway.
1 odd day from 13x28 is the perfect excuse for a new holiday too. And avoids having to figure out is it a weekday or not. It gets to be neither, a unique special holiday not tied to religion, nationality, culture, politics, etc (though many oppose it for reasons within those topics).
speaking of leap days, I also considered using a quad-year as a unit, integrating the leap day as a standard day. 365.25x4=1461. But that only divides by 3 and 481, even worse!
The Baha’i calendar is 19 months with 19 days, and a 4 or 5 day celebration in between months 18 and 19. The year starts the day that coincides with March 21.
To investigate that question, we have to go back a little further into the word’s history. The French word “coronel” is derived from the Italian word “colonnello.” When the French borrowed the word, however, they found it difficult to pronounce. In an effort to ease the pronunciation problem, they changed the first “l” sound to an “r” sound. This is quite a common occurrence; when there are two “l” sounds or two “r” sounds near each other in a word, one of them is frequently omitted or changed to a different sound to eliminate a tricky pronunciation. Linguists call this type of alteration “dissimilation.”
When English later adopted the word (in the 16th century), the French pronunciation was kept, but the letter “r” was changed back to an “l,” making the term look more like the original Italian word and producing the conflict we continue to have between spelling and pronunciation.
english is my second language and i feel it has wasted a lot of brain memory, because i have to learn the spelling and pronunciation of each word separately and the link them together, when i could just learn one of those and know the other
Same and in most situations I can pass as an English first speaker.
I was at IKEA buying a bed frame and asked the person at the counter if she had put the slats on the bill… But I pronounced it like slates because I was sure I had seen an “e” at the end of the word and there went the illusion 🤷
W Szczebrzeszynie chrząszcz brzmi w trzcinie, i Szczebrzeszyn z tego słynie. Much more shchushy than sheeshchy, but still. Also, who the fuck thought that trzcina was a reasonable set of sounds to call anything
Lmao I’m pretty sure there’s a video of me saying “I am a pedophile” in Polish on someone’s phone. I was on Omegle, and came across this group of teenage girls. We were talking about languages and stuff, and they asked me to say something in Polish. It was goddamn hard and I couldn’t make out a word. The only word that I could make out was “pedo” something something. Aaaaand they were recording me.
I did ask them about this, and they denied it of course. However, they didn’t seem to be making fun of me or anything. They seemed to be very nice and stuff. Idk, perhaps it was just an innocent cultural exchange. At least I like to think that it was. But uk… You can’t (and shouldn’t) trust anyone on the internet n stuff…
Literally can mean figuratively if you hate being clear, but it's a much easier world to live in if words don't mean two precisely fucking opposite things.
I'm not saying English is perfectly consistent or that its never happened before, I'm saying why introduce ambiguity that gains nothing? Do we truly not have enough very/really analogs?
That’s because they’re words used to provide emphasis in the same sense as the original word.
Very and verily are similar. I’m very tired, or verily I am tired. Maybe one is used more to say “to a great extent” and the other to mean “no kidding”, but they’re roughly the same. Same with truly from the root same root as “truth”.
What makes “literally” vs. “figuratively” annoying is that literally used to mean “not figuratively”, but is now used to emphasize a metaphor or a comparison.
So, “it’s literally 5 tons” could mean either it’s actually 5 tons, or that it’s very heavy but probably nowhere near 5 tons. If someone actually wants to say that it is actually true that it is 5 tons, the worst word they can use to emphasize that truth is “literally”.
This exactly. You can have a different meaning for a word if there’s a good reason for it. I have never heard a justification for this other than “Language changes, get over it lol”
Plenty of words mean two precisely opposite things. Cleave, clip, dust, sanction, argue, drop, and a bunch of other examples that I’m shamelessly copying from a website
Language doesn’t work properly without context anyway. Saying “I literally died” has one obvious meaning when I’m talking about a meme someone posted on discord, and a different obvious meaning when I’m talking to the news about the time my heart stopped beating.
You aren't interacting with the premise of my argument. I'm not saying this hasn't happened before. I'm saying is it useful to add another one that has no actual use beyond "I cannot think of an adverb"?
“I literally died” has one obvious meaning when I’m talking about a meme someone posted on discord, and a different obvious meaning when I’m talking to the news about the time my heart stopped beating.
But, “I literally died” can never be misinterpreted because ghosts aren’t real. “Literally” has no obvious meaning if someone says “I’m literally suffocating”. Does someone need to be helped with a serious medical condition, or are they using a metaphor to describe their feelings?
What makes it annoying is that the word that got co-opted was a word that existed to make it clear that something wasn’t an exaggeration or a metaphor. Yes, language requires context, but it’s annoying when a word can mean two very different things, and you have to ask for context in order to interpret the word.
You know how I said language doesn’t work properly without context? You don’t have to ask for context when someone tells you something. I struggle to think of a situation where it isn’t obvious in the moment whether someone means “literally” literally or figuratively. For example, “I’m literally suffocating.” Did you actually think about the reality of a situation where someone tells you this? You can just look at a person and know whether they’re struggling to breathe.
I admit that if someone sends a text that reads “I’m literally suffocating” without any context, then that’s not very useful, but that just works further to my point that context matters.
“Literally” has been used to mean “figuratively” since at least the 18 th century. Descriptivists (and actual linguists) have no problem with this. It’s a hang up of people who don’t actually study language but just want to tell other people what to do to make themselves feel superior. It was used in the figurative sense by Charles Dickens, Charlotte Bronte, James Joyce, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, among many others.
James Joyce is a bad example. My man will use any word phthalatically, praxically and with attendancy to drum the nepenthe of the scouring sense held within the addled consciousness that inexorably reaches for the Cratylus — περὶ ὀνομάτων ὀρθότητος — Hades grins, his priapus rising, and farts laconically; toilets toilets all is toilets and shite to shine in the blithering morn
First, Joyce’s work varies across all of his writing, and second, you can’t pick the one author out of a list and use that to dismiss the argument. It’s basically the same as dismissing the singular “they.” It has a historical basis, and the entire meme is about descriptivism, which is based in how language is used rather than prescribing how it should be used.
Take the utilitarian position: the word “literally” is more useful if it is distinct from the word “figuratively”, but in most other cases descriptivist definitions are more useful.
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