They think they look like dainty ballerinas, but most look like crude snowmen with tiny lil undecorated heads

She looks exactly like the daughter of one of my old landlords when I lived in a basement suite. The landlord was elderly, daughter in her 30s. She'd come over when her mom was out of town and stay up all night making random noises. She once said she was "just recording piano sound effects" at like 3am like it was an explanation.

That's an odd thing to be worried about...

It's a stepping stone to the final form of red flag women's hairstyles: senior women with pigtails.

I hereby recommend a non-gendered use of "twat" to refer to all people behaving in such a manner. Or if gendering is preferred "cheese-dick" for the men.

Almost all terms seem to do this nowadays.
Girlboss. Gaslight. Take a knee. X lives matter. Hero. Disrupt. etc.

I think it's a combination of how deeply ironic we all are, the speed with which information spreads and mutates, and the need to turn everything into branding.

People express concern about the death of truth in our society, but I think it's more a death of meaning.

It literally started getting worse exponentially when people stopped learning what words actually mean and dismissed dictionaries as for old fuddy-duddy nerds and pedants.

I understand that language evolves, and I'm fine with that, but I'm sure there are lots of nice Karens in the world who just want their name to stop being a meme.

Was there ever a time that anyone other than fuddy-duddys consulted the dictionary regularly? Also, way to use "literally" and "exponentially" unnecessarily in a rant about over-used expressions.

Looks like you missed the joke, Mister Yuck, but I guess irony is dead along with established meanings for words. I indeed have a pet peeve about people using literally when they literally mean figuratively, and people using "exponential" when they just mean "a lot". At least during the pandemic many instances of increases in deaths/case counts/etc WERE indeed exponential!

Dictionaries are descriptive, not prescriptive. People are going to use words how they use them. Dictionaries catch up to this, rather than run ahead of it.

People need to know what other people are saying, but the regulation of idiosyncratic use occurs through the community of speakers rather than an external authority. I agree that precision and nuance are lost when people use words like "decimate" that have a precise meaning to express something broad (destroyed rather than -10%), but the fact that people use it that way and we all know what they mean means that's an accepted meaning of the word and there's nothing anyone can do about it.

To put it another way, the dictionary isn't the manager of language.

ashtar I think people have missed the mark and went from "dictionaries are an approximate descriptive normalized form of language from a certain perspective at a specific time" to "lol dictionaries are meaningless" with a bit too much ease. As usual something in the middle is necessary.

White entitlement is big problem in this country. Anything calling it out is a-okay even if it's not 100% gender neutral.

Besides, nobody who's actually worked in retail or the food service industry would ever tell you that complaining problem customers are perfectly divided down the middle.