this post was submitted on 08 Dec 2025
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My two are Literally, and Crescendo. I really hate it when they are used wrong, and now the wrong answers are considered acceptable. That means Literally actually holds no meaning at all, and by changing the definition of Crescendo, the last 500 years of Western Music Theory have been changed by people who have no understanding of music at all.
I was not aware of the crescendo one and looked it up. Imagine my surprise learning this dates back at least 100 years ago with the Great Gatsby (have not read it). I am now irrationaly angry that I'm learning about this way too late to complain about it.
Literally being used in the absurdist manner also dates back to the 1800s
I knew that and wasn't irrationally angry at this one. A hyperbolic or absurd meaning does not bother me (but I get that its "overuse", for a while, could).
Literally holds meaning, two meanings principally. They just happen to be opposite. "Literally" could mean either "actually" or "not actually, but similar in a way", but wouldn't ever mean "duck".
"Literally" only holds the opposite meaning when used as a hyperbole.
You should literally literally when a literally flies straight for your face because those feathered fowl can be as aggressive as gooses.
Joke's on you, I'm having roasted literally for dinner
How does someone use crescendo wrong?
Apparently, to mean the climax rather than the increase leading to it.
It's supposed to mean an increase in volume, but instead it now means a climax. Saying something will "rise to a crescendo" is a popular saying, I've seen many good writers say it, but it is wrong. The rising part IS the Crescendo, and the proper way to say it would be that something "crescendoed to a climax." It is a specific musical term, with a specific musical meaning, and non-musical people have adopted it improperly.
Civilians can't just come in and start stealing jargon words and apply their own non-jargon meanings. We rely on those meanings to communicate in that world. It would be like suddenly calling a tire iron a stethoscope, and not understanding why a doctor would think that's stupid.
This is (literally) one of the more insane takes I've ever seen about language. You want jargon to apply only as jargon meaning in all contexts? Lay usage aside, what about when two fields of study use the same word? Battle royale to see who gets to keep it?
Obviously you look into the literature to see who has the first claim, and they get to keep it. The others have to edit and re-print the entirety of the corpus.
Sounds reasonable to me.
There is certain language that is technical to specific things.
A writer wants to borrow language from other worlds to add spice to their writing, so perhaps they borrow a musical term because they think it will describe an action with a special flair. He basically knows that the word Crescendo is a word that somehow relates to intensity, although he's not exactly sure of the nuance of it, but it has a really musical sound, and will add some nice flavor to his sentence. So he writes about something "rising to a crescendo" and every person who ever had band as a kid, or took piano lessons, etc. CRINGES.
It's not just about shifting language, it's about writers not offending their readers with imprecise, poorly chosen words. A writer should strive to choose the absolute correct word, with the exact nuance, and using Crescendo in place of Climax is an egregious example of a poor, imprecise choice that compromised the narrative, and worse, makes the reader question the writer's competency.
Truman Capote once sat at a bar with another writer, who said "I've spent all day working on one page," and Capote said "I spent all day working on one word."
That's because he wanted to choose the exact word, with the precise nuance, to tell his story. I believe that Capote would agree with me about Crescendo.
A writer once put the letter 's' in 'eiland' in order to make the word look more Latin. This, despite the fact that the word 'island' has no Latin roots. It caught on and now that is the proper spelling of 'island' and you'd be a fool to try to force people to spell it 'eiland'.
English is used by the unwashed masses and trying to get it to adhear to strict rules or not change will be as effective as trying to stop a flood by holding out your hand.
English was not exactly right when you were born with the spelling of 'island' and was wrong hundreds of years ago with 'eiland', nor is it wrong that dumb means stupid instead of mute, or literally can be used to mean figuratively.
Gif þū ne sacast for eftcyme to Eald Englisc, þonne is hit līcnessēocnes tō sacanne þæt sprǣc ne mæg wrixlan.
I sure hope you say pizzas are disk-shaped, not circle-shaped.
Disk and circle are properly defined geometric terms. Civilians can't just come in and start misusing them.
To be fair maybe you do make the difference between disks and circles, but the point is, you (and everyone) almost certainly "abuse" some other language element that will also annoy somebody else. And if they corrected you, when all your life you and people around you had done the same abuse and understood each other perfectly, you'd think, rightly, that they are being pedantic.
Do you mean Disk, or Disc?
Both spellings are accepted to designate the mathematical object. I think it's mostly a UK vs US spelling but please don't quote me on that.
EDIT just realised I missed the opportunity to answer with the extremely unhelpful mathematician response: "yes"
Look it up, it's actually fairly complicated, depending on whether you are talking about storage media, vertebrae, Frisbees, etc. and then there is a layer of US vs UK that gets involved.
Oh, yeah, and as for the answer about pizzas, they're Round. I've never called one a disk(c), or a circle.
I am talking about none of these things. I am talking about the well-defined, mathematical concept called a disk (or disc). That is, the flat surface bounded by a circle. In the same way that if I was talking about a square in the sense of a shape, I would be talking about the geometric object, not a square as in "town square" (yes they often have four sides too, and no, they're not always square shaped).
Re disk: I have seen both spellings in the maths literature, I just am not sure whether the distinction is as simple as US vs UK, or if it is more granular (Cambridge vs Oxford for instance), and whether there is also a temporal element to it.
Also, I am sorry that this is now so needlessly pedantic, but it kinda sorta proves my point. We don't need all that to agree that pizzas are circle shaped, and I would not actually have corrected you and said "no, they are a disk!". All of that is pseudo-intellectual wank in the context of talking about pizzas.
EDIT re your "round" shadow edit. Well now you're just deliberately missing the point. Have a good day.
I understand that civilians are under no obligation to follow the rules of language, but writers should be striving for precision in their language. Impressionism doesn't really work for literature. You can't be blurry.
From the perspective of a person who relies on specific language in their sector, like music or science or auto mechanics, seeing a word that has a specific, precise definition that we rely on to communicate within that world, being used incorrectly, doesn't just muddy the writer's narrative and meaning, it compromises the writer's integrity, and questions their competence. They are writers, shouldn't they know the precise meanings of every single word they use, and use it in the proper context?
A good musician knows every single note they are playing, and that note's context within the harmonic and formal structure of the work they are playing. Even a single wrong note is absolutely unacceptable. If a musician played with the same acceptance of imprecision that this thread is suggesting is okay for writers, they would never be considered a competent musician.
There is no problem with a writers using specific jargon to elevate their prose, but they have an obligation to use those terms precisely. Otherwise, just make up your own words. Stop fucking up everybody else's, especially those that require precise meanings in their original, normal use.
Won't read the rest, this is enough for me to understand you're now either arguing in bad faith, or are ignorant of how language evolves. Is English you first language? Look up the contributions of Shakespeare to the language. Are you Italian, like "piccolo" could suggest? Look at Dante Alighieri.
Your language would be different without the freedom that writers take over the ages, and for one thing you're unhappy about, there are a myriad you don't even think twice about, and hopefully, quite a few metaphorical and poetic idioms that you find beautiful.
I won't engage further. Have a good day.
The concept that precision in meaning isn't important to writing is silly. Literary license is one thing, but using words that are flatly wrong and then demanding they be accepted is nonsense.
Would you be so understanding if some artists wanted to start labelling the color red as blue, because they feel like it, and they don't care how confusing it is, or how dumb it makes them look?
Or if musicians started playing random accidentals in their Bach performances, because they don't feel it's important to alter keys at their whim?
That would be the equivalent of a writer inserting bacon random words.
The musical equivalent would be a musician making a deliberate choice to alter the performance because they like how it changes the piece. I would be perfectly fine with that.
is Tire Iron, the same as Tyre Lever?
collapsed inline media
Looks like a stethoscope to me.
Everyone can do with a language whatever the fuck they want.
Intelligibility is the only rule in a living language.
So go suck your bravura, and prima vista all over your colla voce.
That's odd
Well yes it is to me too seeing as that abuse was not made, to my knowledge at least, in my native language.
But then I thought, "well if there is a crescendo, unless it goes on forever, there will be a climax". So I kinda get where the abuse (or misunderstanding, or literary license, or whatever the intent is) comes from. I don't, personally, agree with it, so won't use it that way. But whatever I personally think is irrelevant, at least now I am aware someone might mean that. So I guess now, in English at least, it's been long enough and widespread enough it's no longer an abuse (colloquially speaking)
The climax one is in the dictionary.
I'm pretty sure this battle was lost a long time ago. No idea why OP thinks it wasn't.
How do you feel about other words with their own opposite meanings, like dust or sanction? If the meaning isn't clear it's almost always because the speaker constructed a sentence poorly, which of course can lead to misunderstandings even when not using contronyms.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contronym
Interesting! TIL
Literally was being used as an intensifier in both cases where it was being used to signify the truth of something and in the absurdist manner. So, no, it didn't lose all meaning. So long as you're not emphasizing something too absurd to be considered real, the original meaning still holds. And if someone uses the word to emphasize something that could be real, though unlikely, they'll likely get the appropriate follow-up.
On the Crescendo one, do you also get mad about forte? Cause basically the same thing happened there. And no one will confuse the music term for the colloquial term in either case.
I hadn't really thought about forte, but now that you mention it, yeah, that one pisses me off, too. Thinking about it, I do avoid using that term.
And Literally is supposed to mean that some thing is truly as described, to differentiate between exaggeration. So when it is used as exaggeration, it causes the sort of confusion that means exactly what the literal meaning is literally supposed to avoid.
Heaven forbid someone use a colloquialism! How will they ever be understood?
(For the sake of clarity I feel I must point out that I do not believe Heaven should, in fact, forbid such a practice. I fear without this clarification my first sentence is impossible to understand.)
You shouldn't use religious slang in your writing, it offends the Puritans.
"Heaven" originally meant "the visible sky" so this is fine.
That evolution has happened SO many times. Why does "literally" give you fits when "awful" or "terrific" do not? Perhaps because it's the shift you happen to be living through?
Or maybe those other things shouldn't have happened, but it's too late for them. Now we have to save the words that are in danger now.
If a boat is sinking, and I'm saying we have to save those people, would the proper response be "Well, where were you when the Titanic was going down? Why aren't you all worried about them?"
Words aren't "endangered". There are literally an infinite number of potential words, if we need to reinvent a meaning, we can quite easily(see: synonym). Further, the original meanings still exist. You can still use "awful" to mean "inspiring awe" and you're correct, you just won't be understood.
This guy is trying to mop up the beach every time the tide comes in.
Holy shit, that's good
It uses figurative language instead of the literal meaning of words so it's complete nonsense.
Nah, I'm just fighting the battle for Literally and Crescendo. Those are my hills to die on. I can't save the entire literary world by myself.
Those words are already lost.
I think "whence" is a near-perfect example. "Whence" means "from what origin".
The word is used nearly exclusively in the phrase "from whence it came", or "from (from what origin) it came"
Love it.
"I have to return back to the ATM machine, but I forgot my PIN number."