• lunarul@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    Why stop at uncommonly seen, and extremely modern usage, and abandon the well over 200 years of pre-existing knowledge?

    It’s not like those who know its original meaning suddenly decided to change it. If enough people who don’t know or don’t care about the original meaning give it a new meaning, then that does become a “correct” meaning.

    Just like language. You can yell at everyone that literally doesn’t mean figuratively all you want, but in the end it still ended up updated in all the dictionaries as meaning just that (along with its original meaning, of course).