I’ll respond that he’s very much an exception that proves the rule.
The sheer volume of writing produced in the modern world, times the vast number of readers, suggests that more grease, as in regular spelling and hence ease and unambiguity of word recognition would play an outsized role in the spped and accuracy of reading comprehension and all the goodcstuff that flows from that.
The measure of merit is not “Can some possible set of meanings be, eventually, extracted from the string of scribbles given enough time and effort?”
It is indeed - no dispute there. But it may be on its way to losing the “d” in standard usage, much like “iced cream” did a few centuries back. (See also “damned” —> “damn” in expressions like “a damn shame.”)
Upon my authority as an anonymous Internet person, unadapted borrowings are OK in English, therefore cliché is a noun but also an adjective (past participle of the French verb). This is not an whip cream vs whipped cream situation.
For example:
S’ils parlaient, leurs niaiseries et leurs propos clichés s’inséraient dans le système étudié d’un langage rare, rythmé, pesé mot par mot…
Il me sert quelques phrases clichées de Drumont, qui les a tous empoisonnés, ces pauvres ecclésiastiques.
“cliché” here means stereotyped, in this case figuratively.
Other programs do that, too. It’s because some [expletive deleted] jerk somewhere has decided that nobody is allowed to use more than three periods at a time. Probably the same person who decided that nobody is allowed to use two spaces after the end of a sentence. So the computer “corrects” what you have written. I hate it when what I have written gets changed like this…
Further, if you type two periods here in Discourse, that also gets converted to three. In my case I often alter one of my sentences by throwing in a few more words at the end, 'cuz gosh knows my sentences are never long enough already.
Anyhow, so I set my cursor just left of the existing period, bang the space bar, bash out my extra words, and by habit tap in a new period at the end of the now-completed sentence. Then jump elsewhere for more editing never noticing the double period. Which renders as an ellipsis. Gahh!
At least here on web pages, it’s not Discourse’s fault that double spaces between sentences collapse to one. That was written into the original spec for HTML, the language of the web. Any run of spaces MUST be collapsed into one for display purposes. If you have the tech chops you can look under the covers to see that my post has double-spaces between the sentences because that’s what my hands just do. Discourse faithfully records what I typed and faithfully plays it back to your browser. It’s just that your browser, and everyone else’s browser too, refuses to show them to us.
There are ways to defeat that by substituting clever characters for the spacebar character, but that’s a lot of hassle and the cure is less good IMO than the disease.
If we can think of one more hideous neologism with the right characteristics, we can have an updated version of rock paper scissors.
But does can splatter cream, or does cream smother fruit? I think we need to decide that first so we know which thing our new third one must defeat and which be defeated by.
I think I need to clarify that, for me at least, I am not particularly bothered by the use of “literally” as an intensifier in speech. For example, asking someone how their beach vacation was and their reply being “It literally rained all week”. I know that it did not “literally” rain for seven straight days, but that kind of usage conveys that it rained enough that it severely impacted their enjoyment of their vacation, while ALSO obviating the need to provide unnecessary detail (“it rained four hours in the afternoon on Monday, then three hours on Tuesday. Wednesday it didn’t actually rain, but it was overcast and damp the entire day…”).
My issue is, as stated, when someone uses “literally” as clearly meaning figuratively (e.g. “It was literally raining cats and dogs”). In that instance, if taken at grammatical face value, it takes what is inherently a metaphor (raining cats and dogs) and converts it BACK to its literal meaning, which is of course ludicrous in this example but might just otherwise muddle an otherwise clear meaning in other instances.
But it’s not being used to mean “figuratively” there. It’s being used as an intensifier, just like in the non-metaphorical example. That said, yes, it’s most delightfully used when it is being used literally in a case like this, for example, “the tornado passed right through the pet shelter, so it was literally raining cats and dogs nearby.” OK, maybe “delightfully” is not the right word.
