• 0 Posts
  • 104 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 10th, 2023

help-circle





  • If “literally” means “figuratively,” then we literally have no word for “literally.”

    It’s worth pointing out that you just used the word for “literally” and we knew which sense of the word you meant through context. Just like the verb “dust” can mean to put a layer of small particles on something but can also mean to remove the small particles from something. Humans are able to sort these things out.

    However, one of the best things about language is that if a need actually arises for more clarity about “literalness”, a solution will naturally emerge to address it.

    Even the word “literal” started out as a word that pertained specifically to the written word, and scholarly things, and its sense evolved to refer to things not necessarily written down, to the present meaning of “the most straightforward interpretation of what I’m saying”. A need arose and a word filled the need.





  • Instead of store hours like this:

    • Monday 6:00-18:00
    • Tuesday 6:00-18:00
    • Wednesday 8:00-18:00
    • Thursday 6:00-18:00
    • Friday 6:00-18:00

    We can have store hours like this:

    • Sunday 22:00-Monday 10:00
    • Monday 22:00-Tuesday 10:00
    • Wednesday 0:00-10:00
    • Wednesday 22:00-Thursday 10:00
    • Thursday 22:00- Friday 10:00

    Boy, I would love to live in a place where store hours would be like this. So convenient.

    And I’d love to have the change in the day be sometime in the middle of the day so that “see you tomorrow” means sometime later in the day. Or maybe different areas would use different conventions to refer to the time when the sun is out and most people are doing things and the time when most people are asleep.

    It would also be so pleasant and relaxing to visit a new country and constantly have to calculate the country’s time offset in my head. There would probably be an app on my phone that I would constantly look at that would convert the time where I am to the equivalent time I am used to. I won’t have a sense of when meals are or when I should expect stores to be open, or when it’s reasonable to wake up without converting to the time I’m used to. Some might say the thing I’m used to is my time “zone”.

    It would also be great for TV shows and books to always run into issues when talking about the time because there’s no universal reference.

    Even the actual convenience of scheduling a meeting with people in different parts of the world has issues. Now, you know that whatever time you say is the time for all people. But instead of being able to just look up each person’s time zone and see “oh, it would be 3am there, so they’d be asleep”, you’d have to go to some website that tells you what time most people sleep or what time most people eat meals, or whatever, and see by how many hours it differs.





  • CoggyMcFee@lemmy.worldtoLemmy Shitpost@lemmy.worldStay Mad, Tankies
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    6
    arrow-down
    10
    ·
    edit-2
    3 months ago

    It’s a frigging figure of speech. It doesn’t literally mean both options are “evil” anytime it is used. And you’re not “choosing evil” by voting for Biden — not for the people whose lives will be ruined if Trump wins. For many you are preventing evil.

    If a few more people in a few states had chosen the “lesser evil” of Hillary over Trump, the Supreme Court wouldn’t be delivering supreme evil every few months for the foreseeable future.

    (I don’t need to hear about how Hillary did a bad job in the election — it doesn’t change the fact that the consequences are what they are.)