this post was submitted on 31 Mar 2025
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Individuals displaying mischievous, spiteful, or teasing behavior in a playful manner, rather than engaging in genuinely cruel actions.
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Did you literally read the post?
Hi. Third party here. They're correct: that's literally not what literally means. Ok thanks bye.
Fourth party here: definitions are descriptive not prescriptive and vary by common usage. Due to current common usage, literally means both literally and figuratively, with the original definition slowly losing ground. So no one is correct.
If everybody was jumping off a bridge, would you do that, too?
Depends on how many survive, but I don't see what that has to do with linguistics.
True, but if you wanted to articulate the concept formerly known as "Literally", how would you do it? I just woke up, and my brain hasn't booted all the way to desktop yet, but I can't immediately think of another word to fill the niche.
The closest I can come is "genuinely" but the connotations don't quite fit for all uses.
we need a /L1 /L2 etc corresponding to which definition of literally we are using? /s
It's cool. The Lemmy dogpile started and I'll be buried in a figurative hole soon.
But is it a figurative burying or a meta-literal one? I mean if you really think about things entomologically and we pick apart the Latin root words of "bury" and "dogpile" we might just find that the meaning of lemmy dogpile changes completely depending on context, literally figuratively.
Language is fucked. We really need telepathically beaming abstract concepts directly into brain matter so I don't have to crawl through linguist brainrot reply chains.
Yes.