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Cake day: July 10th, 2023

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  • I have never said that every single word in existence has had 2 opposing definitions at once. I simply said all words went through the process where people think the “new” uses are confusing. And one of the most common mechanisms for that is something being used in a seemingly opposite way than its common definition. But since you asked, here’s some of them: https://www.dailywritingtips.com/75-contronyms-words-with-contradictory-meanings/

    And Wikipedia has a list of common contranyms: https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:English_contranyms

    And some examples of words that used to mean one thing but now mean something completely different or even opposite: Every word. Lol, I’m not kidding, almost no words have ever meant the same thing over a long period of time (usually the ones that have are things like “water” or “horse” which our ancestors needed to survive over time). But some specific examples would be: Awful, Terrific, Nimrod, Trust (noun).

    Semantic drift is one of the most important concepts in linguistics. It is THE REASON we have separate languages. The reason we have French and English and German and Russian as different languages is semantic drift (and phonological shifts for the pronunciation part).


  • Of languages that don’t have articles? Russian, Japanese, pretty sure Arabic, a majority of synthetic languages have no articles.

    Japanese has no pronouns depending on what you consider a pronoun, pro-drop languages like Spanish or Italian don’t use subject pronouns except for emphasis.

    Chinese languages have no tense. Burmese, Malay, Indonesian, Thai, Vietnamese have no tense. Pirahã has only future tense. Japanese only has 2 tenses, one is past and one is combined present and future.

    Pirahã is also debated to have no number system and no names for colors.

    There’s plenty of features that people who speak a language think is necessary that plenty of other languages just don’t have. Languages are extraordinarily different and fluid. Word meanings shifting over time, in the case of “literally” where it starts meaning something very different is one of the most common, and gives you the words like “black” in English (which came from the same word that “white” in other languages like French or Spanish came from).



  • There is no such thing as a specific as possible language. Language is literally JUST ambiguity. Again, every word you use right now was complained about when its definitions slowly shifted in the same way you complain about words “losing their clarity”. That’s called LANGUAGE CHANGE.


  • Literally (ha) all linguists would disagree with you there. The word “literally” here has gone through the same evolution that EVERY WORD GOES THROUGH. EVERY WORD YOU SPEAK went through the same thing where you would call it “less clear” or “useless” or whatever.

    Language is always unclear. You do not have the same perception of words as someone else does. If we arbitrarily assigned some word uses as “useless” based on someone’s personal idea of what’s useful, we wouldn’t have language. A lot of people would call articles useless (words like “the” or “a/an”), a lot of people would call pronouns useless (I/you/they/etc.), a lot of people would call marked tense useless (no more past tense or future tense!). A lot of languages don’t have these features. English speakers might think grammatical case is useless. Why do you get to decide what’s useless or not? Why is using “literally” as something for emphasis useless to you, and why do you think it’s so objective that you should have the authority to remove that from the language?


  • People have been crying about language change in all languages since the dawn of speaking. You can look back to relatively recently with the Romans, they’d always complain about non-standard dialectal and colloquial speech and how the youth are ruining our language, or people from X geographical area are butchering Latin rather than using the standard dialect (Classical Latin).

    It’s no different today. People (upon political/cultural motivation) complain about using “they” as a gender-neutral singular pronoun, saying it’s confusing (even though we’ve used it as a singular pronoun for those of unknown gender since “they” was borrowed into English), but don’t bat an eye at “you” which was first a plural only (as opposed to singular “thou”) and then gradually shifted to a formal singular pronoun, then to just the only second person pronoun for both numbers. People also complain about pronunciations of words like nuclear, asks, comfortable, etc.

    The myth of mispronunciation is a plague upon human language.


  • You blame the school instead of your parenting which is at fault*

    Usually kids “misbehave” in public because of close-minded parents or parents who try to control their kid too much, and most of all parents who don’t encourage good behaviour correctly. Parents really like to blame their kid for behavioural issues when in reality they’re the reason it’s a problem. (Especially with e.g. people who have disabilities like Bipolar, Autism, ADHD, parents internally blame their kid for everything and punish the kid, even though the disturbances caused by the disorders are something you can address and help the kid with with good parenting)

    I suspect most of the kids who do that kind of stuff are neurodivergent and either undiagnosed or not treated correctly by their parents and not given proper treatment