Twain:
And when the middle of the afternoon came, from being a poor poverty-stricken boy in the morning, Tom was literally rolling in wealth.
Alcott:
The land literally flowed with milk and honey on such occasions,
Dickens:
‘Lift him out,’ said Squeers, after he had literally feasted his eyes, in silence, upon the culprit
And so on
It’s not the product of having a bad vocabulary. The English language changes all the time. And “literally” not commonly being used in a figurative sense is relatively recent the figurative meaning dates back to the 1600s.
Mark Twain used the figurative literally. As did Emily Bronte, Charles Dickens, Louisa M. Alcott, and many more people widely considered to be among the best authors ever to have lived. I don’t think anybody has accused them of having poor vocabularies, or not using words “properly”
It even makes sense WRT the etymology, because it means “as in literature”, from the Latin “literalis” - “pertaining to words”
If you want to have a go at an intensifier for being used improperly, you’d do better to target “really”. It means “like reality”, from the Latin “realis” - “actual”
So a sentence like “I was really shitting myself” makes less sense than “I was literally shitting myself”, if we’re referencing fear rather than faeces
The funny thing about the figurative literally is that it being “wrong” is pretty recent and short lived. You’ll find it in many works considered some of the best literature ever written - Little Women, The Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn, David Copperfield, Wuthering Heights, and many more
There’s a punk band who were called Slaves. After a free years of people saying “are you sure that’s the name you want to go with, being a couple of white guys?” They decided no they were not and changed it to Soft Play
That’s the one i was thinking of - for anybody who hasn’t heard of them: that’s not the band name. That’s the acronym of the band name. Each one of those letters belongs to a word
Maybe wait a few decades. Maybe Trump really has fucked It forever
For a real answer, they’re claiming the space. They’re demonstrating that they can control it and you
There was a reddit thread a few years ago where insiders from industries were asked what was true about their industry that the moneymakers wouldn’t want the public to know. A sunglasses guy said that the build quality of all sunglasses above something like $10 was identical. Above that price you’re literally just paying for the logo
Make sure they’re UV safe, make sure the lenses don’t distort your vision, and buy something cheap
It could grip it by the husk
Vance is smarter than Trump, less driven by his own impulses, and more directly under the control of Thiel
He doesn’t have the cult of personality Trump does, but if/when you’ve rigged the elections so you’ll always win, what does that matter?
I definitely thought we’d have Ar glasses by now
Without commenting on any specific meme (if for no other reason than that imgur is booked the UK and i can’t see the image) and without meaning to disparage OP in any way, because i believe they are asking an honest question, i think that sometimes it’s a question of framing. I think of it like this:
Say you’ve broken your leg and it’s painful for you to hobble around on crutches. You get to work and find that the lift (elevator for the yanks) is out of order. You work on the 20th floor and have no choice but to take the stairs. You talk about how unpleasant this is going to be for you, and a colleague says “yes, everybody hates taking the stairs”. Maybe they do, but it’s not the same thing.
Which again isn’t to suggest that everybody posting memes about neurodivergence is talking about real traits, just that the idea that “everybody runs out of social battery sometimes and therefore everybody is on the spectrum somewhere” isn’t really accurate. It can be the difference between deciding to skip a party because you’d rather curl up with a book and spending 4 months not exchanging a single word with another human being. Or the difference between having a favourite film which you say you’re “obsessed” with and spending 9 days straight watching it on repeat while only sleeping 4 hours a night because the other 20 are you watching the film.
A decade or two ago people used to say “everybody’s a little bit OCD”. That seems to have fallen out of fashion now. I’m reminded of the meme which goes something like one person saying “I’m a bit OCD, i arrange my books by colour”, and the second person saying “cool. I think that if I don’t flip the light switch 40 times all my family will die”.
I understand what you’re saying and the political point you’re making but welfare, in political terms, is defined as state intervention via public institutions to ensure the economic and social wellbeing of its citizens.
That over-simplifies the definition of neoliberalism, and the contested nature of definitions of that term. It also ignores the differences between the liberalism that Thatcher claimed and her actual policies (although I’m not claiming that Hayak, for example, wasn’t part of the then-current definition of liberalism), particularly her social policies.
I promise you, despite what Wikipedia claims, if a British newspaper were to refer to a liberal politician, they would not include Thatcher and Johnson.
Firstly, the social aspect of the term liberalism is more prominant than the economic. And secondly, it would be rare in the modern age to see it applied to Hayakian economics as opposed to Keyensian.
Neoliberalism, as a term, is to liberalism as Libertarian is to liberalism. They share a root and you can point to similarites, but once you scratch beneath the surface they aren’t all that similar and have important areas of opposition.
To be more specific on the capitalism front, liberals generally support a well-regulated market which also has safety nets like welfare. As opposed to positions like neoliberalism which supports As opposed to positions like neoliberalism, which supports laissez-faire markets and opposes welfare.
Wait ‘till i make the argument that “irregardless” is fine, actually…,