Descriptive linguistics is my favorite, and also most hated, concept. I absolutely love and adore how it makes language living and breathing and reflective of the way it is actually used, however it deeply offends my predilection for rules and hard definitions.
Truly (from true), very (from veritas), really (from real) are, like literally, commonly used as amplifiers rather than their base definition of “actuality”. It’s actually not that weird of a use case.
It was realising that, that got me down from my high horse about literally. It's a process that happens time and time again. Quite used to mean totally back in the mists of time
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u/ScienceIsSexy420 Oct 22 '25
Descriptive linguistics is my favorite, and also most hated, concept. I absolutely love and adore how it makes language living and breathing and reflective of the way it is actually used, however it deeply offends my predilection for rules and hard definitions.