Plenty of stuff humans believe that are not parodies however. It remains an incomplete look at things, just as today's social media covers.
I covered the Irish desertions before in the Union army. Significantly higher than other groups of Union troops, which included native reds.
The P of Rome by recognizing the Confederacy's claims as legitimate, automatically under Canon law, put the Protestant Lincoln was the invader and tyrant, to which death is a god and church mandated calling, not merely a moral or political act of policy. The forbidden question to Southern Irish and Scottish who saw Lincoln as a tyrant, would be to ask them, then is the P of Rome the Vicar of Yeshua and God, one step below that of a divine king but with all the temporal powers and authorities?
The Jesuit oath of allegiance has already been uncovered as one of the more extreme fealty oaths, even more than Marxism and Stalinism and Maoism generated.
That's what dictionaries actually do, record what words mean to the people that use them, not dictate what they think they should mean or used to mean. Dictionaries haven't done that for over fifty years, nor should they. American Heritage just records the changes more slowly, by design.
Words change all the time, and in strange ways. In this case, the word "literally" started taking on the meaning "emphatically" as much as a century ago. I still only use it by its older meaning only, because I think it preserves a good distinction. When people use it only as hyperbole or as an intensifier I note that they are not as precise in their speech as I would like. But I don't blame the dictionary for noticing that the change has occurred.
I know that this bothers people who think of themselves as language purists and want the dictionary to back them up with prescriptive definitions, but the intellectual arguments for that fall apart pretty quickly. (Available upon request.) An interesting book on the topic is The Story of Ain't: America, Its Language, and the Most Controversial Dictionary Ever Published
There are plenty of words that mean both Z and ~Z. They are called contranyms. From memory, I know that oversight, sanction, cleave, and downhill can have opposite meanings. Guest and host come from the same PIE root, and both hostile and hospital come from it as well.
An example of AVI's language drift is in the term "pursuit of happiness". There is some scholarly research using the context of the Founding Fathers, that the term meant freedom of religion to them and not the way we use the term to mean "do whatever we want in life".
There is also Shakespeare as well as Ancient vs Modern Greek translations of the Septuagint. The words themselves do not change sound complex, but the meanings drift over time. This is why people do not have the Word or even Words of God. They have a translation (of a translation), often little better than the foreign subtitles of a movie. With a movie, at least there is body language and tone that conveys the information where the words fail.
It’s not quite like those cases. You cleave if you cling to or sever, but not if you do neither. Sanction, etc. This is a stranger case because it embraces “literally” everything: that which is, and that which is not. In that sense the word has become meaningless, because it means everything.
Words change meaning, as you say, but a change from meaning to meaningless is still worth noticing. The language becomes less powerful, less valuable, when words cease to mean.
Oh it does, yes. Agree fully. But don't blame the dictionary. The dictionary reflects the culture, like a measuring stick, and when it tries to do otherwise, it fails.
If "in the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God", it's no wonder, as we chase God out of our society, we find words becoming meaningless babel. We even have an industry committed to manufacturing it- universities.
15 comments:
My American Heritage Online Dictionary still has the correct definition, none of the timid bastardization of Merriam-Webster.
AH has been my go to dictionary for a long time. It'll continue to be.
Eric Hines
Good lord I felt my IQ dropping as I read that.
If it spent as much money on brains as it did on hair, perhaps idiocy would flee.
Browsing the account, I'm pretty sure this is parody a la Titania McGrath.
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2017/11/no_author/whitewashing-the-tyrant-abe/
Plenty of stuff humans believe that are not parodies however. It remains an incomplete look at things, just as today's social media covers.
I covered the Irish desertions before in the Union army. Significantly higher than other groups of Union troops, which included native reds.
The P of Rome by recognizing the Confederacy's claims as legitimate, automatically under Canon law, put the Protestant Lincoln was the invader and tyrant, to which death is a god and church mandated calling, not merely a moral or political act of policy. The forbidden question to Southern Irish and Scottish who saw Lincoln as a tyrant, would be to ask them, then is the P of Rome the Vicar of Yeshua and God, one step below that of a divine king but with all the temporal powers and authorities?
The Jesuit oath of allegiance has already been uncovered as one of the more extreme fealty oaths, even more than Marxism and Stalinism and Maoism generated.
In other words, human insanity did not start on twitter. Nor will it end on twitter.
Deevs:
So you’re saying we are meant to take it literally?
Grim:
Thanks to the asinine re-definition of literally to mean figuratively, I have no idea how to answer your question.
Logically, if z is satisfied by either Z or ~Z, then you can’t go wrong by affirming z. What’s strange here is that z somehow means both Z and ~Z.
That's what dictionaries actually do, record what words mean to the people that use them, not dictate what they think they should mean or used to mean. Dictionaries haven't done that for over fifty years, nor should they. American Heritage just records the changes more slowly, by design.
Words change all the time, and in strange ways. In this case, the word "literally" started taking on the meaning "emphatically" as much as a century ago. I still only use it by its older meaning only, because I think it preserves a good distinction. When people use it only as hyperbole or as an intensifier I note that they are not as precise in their speech as I would like. But I don't blame the dictionary for noticing that the change has occurred.
I know that this bothers people who think of themselves as language purists and want the dictionary to back them up with prescriptive definitions, but the intellectual arguments for that fall apart pretty quickly. (Available upon request.) An interesting book on the topic is The Story of Ain't: America, Its Language, and the Most Controversial Dictionary Ever Published
There are plenty of words that mean both Z and ~Z. They are called contranyms. From memory, I know that oversight, sanction, cleave, and downhill can have opposite meanings. Guest and host come from the same PIE root, and both hostile and hospital come from it as well.
An example of AVI's language drift is in the term "pursuit of happiness". There is some scholarly research using the context of the Founding Fathers, that the term meant freedom of religion to them and not the way we use the term to mean "do whatever we want in life".
There is also Shakespeare as well as Ancient vs Modern Greek translations of the Septuagint. The words themselves do not change sound complex, but the meanings drift over time. This is why people do not have the Word or even Words of God. They have a translation (of a translation), often little better than the foreign subtitles of a movie. With a movie, at least there is body language and tone that conveys the information where the words fail.
It’s not quite like those cases. You cleave if you cling to or sever, but not if you do neither. Sanction, etc. This is a stranger case because it embraces “literally” everything: that which is, and that which is not. In that sense the word has become meaningless, because it means everything.
Words change meaning, as you say, but a change from meaning to meaningless is still worth noticing. The language becomes less powerful, less valuable, when words cease to mean.
Oh it does, yes. Agree fully. But don't blame the dictionary. The dictionary reflects the culture, like a measuring stick, and when it tries to do otherwise, it fails.
If "in the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God", it's no wonder, as we chase God out of our society, we find words becoming meaningless babel. We even have an industry committed to manufacturing it- universities.
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