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Pedantry
(lemmy.dbzer0.com)
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this post was submitted on 01 Oct 2025
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If a phrase conveys the opposite of their literal meaning, and the speaker and the audience both know it, then it is pedantic. Choosing to derail whatever the topic is in favor of criticizing someone's understandability when everyone did understand them is pedantic.
I get it, I hate the way people use "literally". It's terrible, it's usually unneeded, and it just makes any actual correct use of literally have less impact. But I'm not gonna correct people who say it wrong, because I do know what they meant.
If they said "I could care less" and you're comfortable enough in your understanding of the conversation to know for a fact they actually mean they do not care about it, then they did make sense and you did understand them.
It's a problem, because I'm never quite sure if they're saying they care a little bit, and are using the phrase literally, or don't care, and are a moron.
That's quite a problem. You tend to get those by dividing things into black and white like that. I've known quite a few smart people that just still don't care about English being imperfect, and I've met a few dumb ones that care greatly about details like word choice and ignore the conversation to focus on errors.
Splitting the world between "people who do a thing you agree with" and "morons" is a choice, but its one I try to avoid as a rule.
And of course literally has been used in both sense for hundreds of years.
And what if I am not comfortable enough in my understanding? When someone is hard to understand because of how non-standard their use of language is, it is a communication barrier, not just pedantry.