Literally Ironic Prescriptivism

These thoughts have been stirring around for a while, and this XKCD inspired me to write them down. This is essentially a summary of my feelings towards linguistic prescriptivism, and when I think certain trends in language should be resisted. All of this is concerned pretty much exclusively with normal conversation, by the way, and not with formal writing, writing instruction, or school standards.

Like many smart kids, I was a little shithead when it came to grammar and usage throughout middle and high school. I think it must be the process of learning and mastering stuff for the first time that makes teenagers so arrogant and eager to show off their skills and knowledge. Rules were rules; definitions were definitions. Everything was written down and spelled out, and if you didn't conform/understand, you had proven yourself lacking.

It took until about junior year of high school to realize that constantly trying to prove oneself is a crappy way to be, and I finally turned into a decently tolerable human being in time for college. I still felt very sure in my ever-improving understanding of language, but at least I wasn't correcting the 'mistakes' of others all the time.

Then I took Intro to Linguistics in college, and on the first day of class the professor went over the difference between descriptive vs prescriptive linguistics and my mind was blown. I slowly came to realize the obvious fact that the entire point of language is to communicate, and that if two people are communicating effectively then to call their communication 'wrong' is fundamentally wrongheaded.

However, there are a few things I still bristle at, although I still rarely correct them, and I have managed to categorize them into two major groups. I'll give examples of what does bother me, what doesn't, and try to explain why. (Note: with all of these examples I have intentionally left out a lot about context and audience, considering instead what the words mean in every day conversation to most people, since that is obviously where most communication happens)

1) Usages that can genuinely lead to confusing semantics.
Both of these examples spring from the XKCD comic mentioned earlier.
It really doesn't bother me that few people know how to use the subjunctive correctly. The reason is that is very very rarely leads to any sort of confusion about meaning. "I wish I was a little bit taller" doesn't really make sense as an indicative statement, and, even if it did, few would misunderstand the sentiment of wanting to be taller than one actually is in the present. Most people know the usage well enough to make themselves understood to 99% of people 99% of the time, and that's good enough. There has only been a handful of times I've seen incorrect usage cause problems here, and I'm pretty sure all have involved time travel and/or alternate dimensions, which are generally tricky subjects anyway.

On the other hand, people using 'literally' to mean 'everything but' often annoys me, mostly because they don't do it very artfully. The editors at Merriam-Webster have a great video explaining why they list 'figuratively' as a possible definition of 'literally,' so I won't go over the descriptivist argument for it, which I think is valid. However, it can be such a fine line, especially when mixing uses. For instance, if you say, "The movie was so funny I was literally dying," I know exactly how you're using the word and why. But if the next movie "was so funny I was literally crying," then I start to wonder. The problem is that 'literally' is at its strongest when it's being used to either convey obvious hyperbole, (urging the listener to picture exactly how funny a movie would have to be to kill someone), or when it's being used to signal the fact that something is explicitly*not* hyperbole (assuring the listener that tears were actually being produced). Any time 'literally' is used in the middle, which you can think of (maybe unfairly) as high-school-girl-usage, things can get ugly and clarification is often needed.

2) Shifting words' meanings' in such a way that we lose easy naming of concepts and ideas
One word I am ok with shifting is the ever-controversial 'ironic.' It has gone from meaning "contrary to appearance, intention, or reality" to "a situation that is coincidentally tragic in a metaphysically humorous way." Both are meaningful, rich concepts to have names for, and ideally we would have unique words for both, but I feel like the latter is a more useful idea to more people, and so it's a net gain to replace one meaning for the other. My solution, by the way, would be to keep ironic meaning 10,000-spoons-ironic and use ironical to mean the more traditional definition, which some people already do.

A word that I am sad about losing, though, is 'addicting.' As I understand it, it used to be that things that caused addiction were 'addicting' and people or situations that were prone to addiction were 'addictive,' a distinction that makes a lot lexical and semantic sense. However, now 'addictive' means 'addicting' and we are left with no word that strongly means the same as the old 'addictive,' which is a useful concept to have a single word for.

Another classic example of losing a good word is 'awesome.' Whenever I read it in old books it is an extremely powerful and complex word, with undertones of fear and timelessness and wonder. Now it is just one of a long line of words that means 'generically positive,' and that's sad, because we've lost a word with rich meaning and replaced it with a limp, impotent one. 'Terrible' is another example here.

So yeah, I think all this pretty accurately summarizes my thoughts on selective prescriptivism. I don't like losing good words, and I don't like ambiguity of meaning. I'm fine with language changing, simplifying, and consolidating, but I think there are some changes that are objectively for the worse, and I'll keep resisting those as much as I can.