Baldo by Hector D. Cantú and Carlos Castellanos for April 15, 2021

good luck making that kind of language dictionary, Baldo

Maybe “living”, Baldo, but moribund.

That’s the trick, isn’t it? Allowing enough flexibility for new words and new meanings for existing words to evolve into common usage without turning increment into a verb.

My favorite dictionary (Amer. Herit. 4th Ed.) calls the figurative use of ‘literally’ a Usage Problem but recognizes it as a common intensifier. Intensifiers have a habit of taking on a life of their own. For example, few people now use “That’s terrific!” to mean terror-inducing. And in French an intensifier that meant something like “I stamp my foot for emphasis” turned into a grammatical rule that a negated sentence must include pas (step).

“Marvelous!”……….Oh, the power of Sarcasm is so overlooked and forgotten. If you think it’s not, it’s snot, and you’ve got another thing coming!:-)

Dumb = mute, mute=silent, silence = golden, Gracie = golden.

if literally can mean figuratively, why not use figuratively?

“They” will be correct eventually. Language changes; read Shakespeare. In 50 years I’ll be dead. No one will need to worry over my niggling, preciously pious opinions about the death of education in the United States of America.

He will as he gets older become a liberal Democrat!

Then words have no meaning if the can randomly change……

A dictionary doesn’t “okay” usage. Its purpose is to describe and define how words are used. Just because something is “in the dictionary,” that doesn’t make it viable in clear and concise communication, and many definitions are marked “informal” or “vulgar” for a reason.

The purpose of language is to communicate. If words don’t have specific meanings, then communication can easily fail, as has happened countless times. Usually language “changes” through misuse. It doesn’t make sense to allow words to “loose” their correct usage.

As the old joke says:

Girls who attend Finishing School learn to say “Fantastic” instead of “Bullshit”.