Why don't the you ger generation understand the meaning of the word literally?

[Fairenuff]

I was literally wetting myself.

No you weren't.

It was literally raining cats and dogs.

No it wasn't

It literally turned the house upside down.

No it didn't.

What is wrong with them. Why don't they know what that word means?

neverwouldhave Irish 😁

Same tyrotoxicity 😂

Thank goodness it's not just me, OkPedro!

When it comes to looking it up in a literal dictionary, there are two types of people in this world. Some of us dig into the standard pocket and some of us spiral down the rabbit holes of the etymological juggernaut.

That's why the younger generation do the literal thing that pisses OP off. It cracks me up because it cracks the obscured mirror of literality.

Dead - ah, that makes sense. DS says it when he approves of something but says he doesn't know where it came from.

It doesn't piss me off. I was expressing curiosity that's all.

I quite like it. It has a good sense of irony.

.

Think of all the pleasure you'd miss out on feeling superior if they did.

This was literally a thing when I were a lass, alongside all other incorrect terms (pacifically, all intense and purpose, etc.) it's not confined to a single generation

At least it's a word. I cannot fathom "don't @ me"

It makes no sense

I bet we use words differently to how they were used a couple of generations ago.

Oh I get "don't @ me" zem, that one makes sense to me

My mum uses it all the time. She's over 70.

The younger generations are getting thicker and thicker.

I was thinking this morning as I stood next to a group of teens that it is fashionable to appear thick. They like to do that thing where they feign misunderstanding, so they can do a sort of puzzled with a hint of condescension face.
I was a TA in a year 4 class of one of the girl’s in the group. At the time she was bright , inquisitive and quick witted. THis morning ( in year 11 I think) she was making a real effort to seem thick and world weary. It seemed like a way of distancing herself from her juvenile self. Occasionally a little beam of interest endearingly shone through and she shut it down quickly.

Of course @ is a word! The symbol manifests the function.

I'll cut out the massive spirally ramble but Fairenuff isn't the dinosaur on that one.

It’s not one that bothers me, however ...

Chap on the bus yesterday, chatting to the driver:

“They’re throwing them baby out with the bathwater”

Pause.

“Literally”

NO THEY’RE NOT

Unthinking ‘literally throwing the baby out with the bathwater’ I could cope with; him apparently deciding what his cliched statement really needed was ‘literally’ tagging in the end was infuriating.

He was in his 60s.

No babies were harmed during the writing of this post.

I always find it's the people whose own knowledge of English is lacking who get humphy about things which are neither new, or wrong.

It's the superiority-sense that bugs me too. It triggers the apprehension of the quality of 'dickishness' on both sides of the perceptual mirror.

It's the awareness of that fact that fascinates me; it just gets interpreted as an imputation about my emotional state along the 'superiority' conceptual-complex.

Literal has both a figurative and a literal definition and the converse is also true! Figuratively means literally because figure is an evolution of lit!

'neither new, or wrong'

neither new, nor wrong, surely?

I'll get my coat

I was a TA in a year 4 class of one of the girl’s in the group.

Did you mean girls?

Almost, Faire.

Neither old nor new.

Neither [old or new].

Where they teach you to put the punctuation versus where you learn to mentally insert the variation does actually make quite a profound difference to the overall meaning-value of the utterance.

But you know this already. Just in an alternative living language-form. It's brilliant.

I didn't type variation in that previous sentence, btw. Male bias in the autocorrect differentiates within the virtual world. It drives it.

I know tyro. I took the commas out but put them back as I didn't really want to make this about every grammar or punctuation error.