ALT TEXT:
- Panel 1: A person with the text “Singular ‘they’” written on them smiling with open arms.
- Panel 2: “Singular ‘They’” beaten up by others who said, “Singular they is ungrammatical. It’s too confusing,” “How can anyone use plural pronouns for singular,” and “Every pronoun should only have one purpose.”
- Panel 3: “You” hiding from the mob who was beating “Singular ‘They’”
- Panel 4: “German ‘Sie’” hiding with even more fear next to “You”
Literally (ha) all linguists would disagree with you there. The word “literally” here has gone through the same evolution that EVERY WORD GOES THROUGH. EVERY WORD YOU SPEAK went through the same thing where you would call it “less clear” or “useless” or whatever.
Language is always unclear. You do not have the same perception of words as someone else does. If we arbitrarily assigned some word uses as “useless” based on someone’s personal idea of what’s useful, we wouldn’t have language. A lot of people would call articles useless (words like “the” or “a/an”), a lot of people would call pronouns useless (I/you/they/etc.), a lot of people would call marked tense useless (no more past tense or future tense!). A lot of languages don’t have these features. English speakers might think grammatical case is useless. Why do you get to decide what’s useless or not? Why is using “literally” as something for emphasis useless to you, and why do you think it’s so objective that you should have the authority to remove that from the language?
Care to give examples?
Of languages that don’t have articles? Russian, Japanese, pretty sure Arabic, a majority of synthetic languages have no articles.
Japanese has no pronouns depending on what you consider a pronoun, pro-drop languages like Spanish or Italian don’t use subject pronouns except for emphasis.
Chinese languages have no tense. Burmese, Malay, Indonesian, Thai, Vietnamese have no tense. Pirahã has only future tense. Japanese only has 2 tenses, one is past and one is combined present and future.
Pirahã is also debated to have no number system and no names for colors.
There’s plenty of features that people who speak a language think is necessary that plenty of other languages just don’t have. Languages are extraordinarily different and fluid. Word meanings shifting over time, in the case of “literally” where it starts meaning something very different is one of the most common, and gives you the words like “black” in English (which came from the same word that “white” in other languages like French or Spanish came from).
No, examples of words that mean two opposite things at the same time, since you apparently said that every single word in existence has always been that way. “Bad” comes to mind, though it’s a lot easier to tell from context which meaning it has compared to “literally.”
Another non-english example would be the german word “umfahren” which can mean both driving around or over something, depending on context