Such as “money can’t buy happiness” or “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger”. Generally a false adage or something like that. All I could think of was “fallacious bumper sticker” which just sounds stupid.
Such as “money can’t buy happiness” or “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger”. Generally a false adage or something like that. All I could think of was “fallacious bumper sticker” which just sounds stupid.
“Decimate” =/= “devastate”, but common misuse becomes common use, so here we are. 🤦♂️
Language is fun like that. Kinda like how ‘literally’ can, and often does, mean ‘figuratively’, which has the opposite meaning.
It annoys me that people keep saying “figuratively” is what they mean instead of “literally”. “Figuratively” may be the opposite, and technically correct, but the use of the word “literally” in this way is to strengthen a statement. A more appropriate correction would be “actually” or “seriously”, which holds the intended meaning. “Figuratively” is the last thing it should be replaced with.
The meaning of a word doesn’t change just because you use it incorrectly.
It does if lots of people use it incorrectly
Yep decimate is so commonly misused that our lovely descriptivist dictionaries are now incorporating the incorrect use as correct. It’s too bad, too, because the word had a very specific meaning which is now lost. The language is less useful for changes like this.