social.outsourcedmath.com

Repeat after me

  • Good, better, best.
  • Bad, worse, worst.
  • The best of all possible worlds.
  • In the worst case.
  • His own worst enemy.
  • For better or for worse.
“Worse” and “worst” ARE NOT SYNONYMS. You are using “worse” when you mean “worst”. You know who you are.

For fuck’s sake, we’ve already been saddled with the ludicrous situation where “literally” has become its own antonym. (Merriam-Webster, for one, officially gave up the fight on that one.) Now, when you use the word "literally", nobody knows any more whether you actually MEAN "literally" or "figuratively" or "ironically" or "absolutely not at all". The endgame of using just whatever word comes to hand to mean whatever the fuck you want it to mean right then, is that nobody knows what the fuck you’re talking about because the words coming out of your mouth make no sense except to yourself.

Languages WORK because we agree on what words mean what things. When we just spew arbitrary word-salad, communication breaks down.

#PetPeeves #GetItRIGHT #EngrishAsSheIsSpoke #grammarfascist
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Footnote:
This could not have been written on Mastodon without splitting it into at least three posts. And it's not even a complex concept. 500 characters at a time is not enough to hold a meaningful conversation.
Sam Smith diaspora
500 characters depends on the setting. Some Mastodon instances have bigger character limits.
Do posts from such "fat" instances get truncated on "thin" instances?
It sure beats Twitter's limit. And there's much to be said for avoiding a wall o text. There's a point at which most eyes glaze over and I'll bet it's at the 500 character line.
Sam Smith diaspora
Oddly, no. Posts do not get truncated. It seems the limit is a supply-end enforcement only, so longer posts from federated servers are brought in unchanged. I saw one that had a 2k character limit, though I can't recall which instance that was.
Seems the change is close to trivial.
draklyckan.se How to increase the character limit in Mastodon
Tedel diaspora
I just loved this. Thank you.

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