• Hazzard@lemm.ee
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    9 hours ago

    Oh, I mean the “fight” the person I’m replying to is suggesting, that dictionaries should be prescriptive (state how English should be, in this case arguing that “literal” shouldn’t be a valid word to use when you’re not being literal in the traditional sense), versus being descriptive (what dictionaries currently are, describing the language as it’s used without any assertions about how it “should” be).

    Dictionaries have been adamantly descriptive since their inception, so they’re not at all doing what glitchdx is suggesting (thus literal having a secondary definition as an intensifier), and I’m arguing for the status quo.