this post was submitted on 13 Jul 2025
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Showerthoughts
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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.
Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts:
- Both “200” and “160” are 2 minutes in microwave math
- When you’re a kid, you don’t realize you’re also watching your mom and dad grow up.
- More dreams have been destroyed by alarm clocks than anything else
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- All posts must be showerthoughts
- The entire showerthought must be in the title
- No politics
- If your topic is in a grey area, please phrase it to emphasize the fascinating aspects, not the dramatic aspects. You can do this by avoiding overly politicized terms such as "capitalism" and "communism". If you must make comparisons, you can say something is different without saying something is better/worse.
- A good place for politics is c/politicaldiscussion
- Posts must be original/unique
- Adhere to Lemmy's Code of Conduct and the TOS
If you made it this far, showerthoughts is accepting new mods. This community is generally tame so its not a lot of work, but having a few more mods would help reports get addressed a little sooner.
Whats it like to be a mod? Reports just show up as messages in your Lemmy inbox, and if a different mod has already addressed the report, the message goes away and you never worry about it.
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Except it literally does.
The oldest known record of that use is from the 1700s, and prescriptivists didn’t start whining about it in any significant amount until 100 years ago.
Upvoting because you are technically right, even though I will never accept that as the definition of literally - and I know this literally puts me in the wrong.
A very easy way to square all this (and what I assumed everyone understood to be going on before I ever heard of this discourse) is that people are just using exaggeration for emphasis (a very common rhetorical tactic).
Of course people aren't saying it's literally thing-they're-referring-to but that it has so much in common that it's "practically" almost exactly that thing.
I feel like people overcomplicate what needn't be complicated, sometimes (like people hallucinating a "fourth-person" pronoun to explain a convention perfectly already provided by current linguistical constructs).
I've certainly never met a perscriptivist who I held in higher regard than Mark Twain.
You're referencing some rando uttering a word and claiming that its early use makes it valid, like people were perfect speakers back then?
Who's the prescriptivist now?
They didn't just utter it. They wrote it down, thus making it canon to language lore. 😌
The notion that “just because someone lived a long time ago, they must have been backwards, ignorant, or stupid” is one that needs to die a loud and public death. It is that line of thinking that leads people to believe that aliens built the Pyramids, Stonehenge, etc. because they are certain that folks back then weren’t clever enough to move large rocks about.
-- The History of Emily Montague, by Frances Brooke, 1769 (emphasis: mine)
The use in the figurative sense isn’t valid merely because of “some rando uttering a word” a long time ago. It is valid because it continued to be utilized with that meaning for the next 250 years and is still used and understandable in that sense to this day.
Citing some historical rando is as descriptivist as it gets.
You’re own source states the opposite
The opposite of what? I’m curious how you interpreted my words, because that quote does not contradict any claim I intended.
I understood you claimed that the first known use of ”literally” would have been used as ”figuratively”, but in the link it says it was used in a literal sense. But I’m tired so I might have gotten something wrong.
Oh, no. I only meant that the use in the figurative sense was more than twice as old as any concerted movement against it. And even that movement is “old”. This isn’t some skibidi Ohio dreamt up by “kids these days”. It has a well established pattern of usage.
I see, that makes sense. Thanks for the clarification!
"used in an exaggerated way to emphasize a statement or description that is not literally true or possible"
Correct! It’s called a contronym, it is such a normal thing in language that they made a word for it.
People are always saying English is weird. Being willing to die on a hill for eccentric word use is one reason lol.