Look up the various meanings of “nice” sometimes, as the meaning changed quite a bit over time.
Foolish, over-precisely accurate, trivial, particular, wanton, punctilious, etc, etc.
Huh, that’s fascinating to me not just because they’re getting corrected for the proper usage, but because to an American using the word “vex” in casual conversation borderlines on sounding pretentious and is definitely not a word you’d hear thrown around in “trashy” or uneducated social circles.
As in “that’s a nice distinction.”
And I’d also like more information bout ‘literal’ once having meant ‘figurative’-- back in medieval/Renaissance exegesis it meant precisely ‘of the letter’ rather than allegorical, typological, etc.
How about wireless? It had long since died as an alternative to radio, but it’s everywhere now relating to internet access.
One that I get a kick out of: In classical times, “ether” meant “the ever-moving”, since it was the stuff that stars and planets are made of, and they’re perpetually moving across the sky. By the late 1800s, though, it had come to mean “the ever-still”, the hypothetical medium through which light was thought to propagate, and against which all motion could be measured.
And while I’m mostly descriptivist in linguistic philosophy, I still insist that “literally” cannot and must not mean “figuratively”, since allowing it to do so makes it impossible to communicate certain concepts. Any other figure of speech or ironic usage can be disambiguated, if necessary, by use of the word “literally”, but if “literally” itself is used nonliterally, there’s no way to do so.
Ablative.
Originally a grammatical form designating a case “to carry away from” or “to move away”, assumed a new role by NASA in the form of heat shields, which protected the capsule by allowing the ablative coating to absorb heat by wearing away during re-entry.
Thee and thou are not archaic at all, tha’ noes.
Theres quite a few Norse words in use in this region, such as laiking, ducal, parne, morte, keke mush, beck, bait.
One that springs to mind that fits the OP, how about “ding” - meaning to hit [Danish = daenge] nowadays used when you put a small dint in your car - yes it really is an old word and not slang.
No, that’s a list of what the OED considers to be the current meanings of the word. I’ve noticed that 3b includes a prescriptive admonition:
Bolding mine.
Prescribing the proper usage of certain words is not a dictionary’s place anyway; a dictionary is (or should be) a log of all the words used in a language, not a style guide. Merriam-Webster is more rational about this:
(Bolding not mine.)
Anyway, even your cite gives a quote from 1863, so I’m not sure what you’re disbelieving.
I could be wrong about the specific sequence of events, but without dates, it’s a little hard to nail down quickly, and I’ve got Syntax homework to do.
Which is unfortunate, since “gender” refers to the social construct of gender (i.e. masculinity/femininity), as opposed to the biological reality of sex.
That’s a bit of a stretch. Like other ironic usages, “literally” can usually reveal itself as ironic pretty easily. Compare “I literally jumped three feet” to “I literally went through the roof”.
I think you’re imagining a hypothetical situation where somebody said something believable and used “literally” to mean “figuratively”, but since the figurative meaning is hyperbole used for emphasis, it seems like that would be rare. If it does happen every once in a while, well, language is confusing sometimes. Nothing we can do about that on an individual level, although you can refuse to use the word that way if you think that will help.
Hostile Dialect,
Hostile Dialect, Narcissist
You haven’t studied the OED entry carefully enough. Calling it a ‘list of current meanings’ ignores the fact that the first meaning is marked as obsolete. OED doesn’t list merely current meanings, it records all senses of the word that it can find, none of which fit with your description.
Literally did not previously mean figuratively, nothing you have cited says that. That 1863 cite is not an older sense, and how you can point to it as such is beyond me.
I repeat, show me a cite for a sense of literally, meaning figuratively, which lapsed into disuse and was then revived. There is no such animal.
And BTW if you consider the OED to be a prescriptive dictionary you really need to look again.
But that’s precisely what the OP was asking about: an archaic word that came back. However, your statement about what gender “refers to” is contradicted by actual usage and also by the OED, which merely says
You are merely taking one particular meaning (“social and cultural”) – which the OED indicates is not the primary one – and prescribing what you think it really should mean.
“Warch”, meaning pain, as in “bellywarch” or “yedwarch” is another Old Norse word, as is “agate”, meaning in the habit of, from the Old Norse, “gata”. “Toot”, meaning a quick look, comes from “toten”, the Anglo-Saxon word for peeping.
I’ve been trying to find out where “powfag”, for exhausted, comes from, though, for some time, without success.
I’d nominate “fracas” and “fisticuffs.” They’re funny-sounding words that sportscasters and entertainment types use, but were archaic until they were dusted off in the last decade or so.
Agreed - quite a few. Concatenate comes to mind.
Avatar is Hindu religious concept. It’s certainly been co-opted recently, but I don’t think it ever fell into disuse.
I hear it from kids. Not frequently, but it’s certainly part of their vernacular.
‘Well vexed’, and more commonly ‘well pleased’, seems to be something that grates with less-informed grammar police. I also enjoy pointing out to teachers eager to correct kids who talk about being ‘larned stuff’ that they’re actually using one of the few surviving features of East Anglian dialects, and that it’s not evidence that they have a lack of understanding of the words ‘learn’ and ‘teach’. (I do it tactfully, honest…)
Can somebodt please revive “rascal” and “scoundrel”? They are very useful (if dated) words.
Usually, but not always, and I’ve seen cases where it really isn’t clear. Consider, for example, “Bob has literally a thousand CDs”. Maybe Bob’s an amateur DJ, in which case that could well be literally true. Or maybe Bob just has more CDs than the speaker, and “thousand” is figurative. Now, if the speaker had said “Bob has, like, a thousand CDs”, then I could ask “Literally?”, and the speaker could then clarify. But with “literally” losing its meaning, I can’t ask that any more.
Dizzee Rascal is trying.
I miss “rapscallion”, “reprobate” and “hie”.