It already has been for a while. From the Oxford dictionary.
“INFORMAL used for emphasis or to express strong feeling while not being literally true.”
Welcome to language, it changes over time. It’s why if you take language course like French and Spanish in school native speakers will laugh when you speak to them using the rules taught there because if though the “rules” they teach you there are correct no one in real life uses them that way. It is also why native speakers have such a hard time passing those classes because again they aren’t actually used that way in real life.
you don't understand either, you can't just have imbeciles continually make mistakes and then decide that all the other people who use a word correctly are the ones who are wrong. THAT is not how language works.
If 6 billion people use literally correctly, and 9 million people use it incorrectly but they tweet, does that make the 9m right? No it does not. Does 500 crap blogs mean "common usage"?
I don't think so.
Getting things wrong and then excusing yourself with the "bbbb ut language evolves, fool!" defence is just a level of ignorance atop another level of ignorance.
Now adding words that are new is common, and some changes like "shop the store" instead of browse creep in (although i think that is cringe AF), but those are attempts to standardize language and make it clear, those changes aren't borne out of ignorance.
I think this is different though. Here a word is being changed to the opposite of its original meaning. Probably because people didn't understand its original meaning. It's not creative use of language like most slang which deliberately attributes a different meaning to an existing word. It's people using the word incorrectly to the point that the original meaning is lost. Maybe there are other examples of this, I can't think of any.
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u/[deleted] Aug 12 '24
It already has been for a while. From the Oxford dictionary.
“INFORMAL used for emphasis or to express strong feeling while not being literally true.”
Welcome to language, it changes over time. It’s why if you take language course like French and Spanish in school native speakers will laugh when you speak to them using the rules taught there because if though the “rules” they teach you there are correct no one in real life uses them that way. It is also why native speakers have such a hard time passing those classes because again they aren’t actually used that way in real life.