I thought decimating meant reducing to a tenth, as in removing 90%?

The meaning is derived from the brutality of the act, not the proportion of people killed.

Yeah, I still feel like I'm supposed to, but frequently I think it makes more sense to pull it outside if it isn't part of the quote. Putting it in the quotation makes it seem like it's associated with the quotation, when it may not be.

We were always supposed to put punctuation inside quotation marks;

Isn't this a US English thing? In India we were taught to close them like brackets - i.e., the one that opened last closes first. So

'Don't wait. I will come later.'

But

He said 'I will come later'.

You know, I actually prefer that it be variable, but only when it serves a purpose.

Like, if Im quoting someone "I might want to indicate that they completed a sentence.", but also continue beyond it.

For me, i make peace with this by thinking, the rules are one way for writing dialog, and perhaps another way when needing to convey the exactness of a quote.

Is it not "point of view"?

“Drives me up the wall” becoming “drives me up a wall”.

As table top gamer, POV always meant point of view... what's a modern meaning of it?

What…what does POV mean now??

Breathe and breath too...

I'd say pram is still pretty British ("I have to push the pram-a-lot!") in the US it would be almost definitely stroller.

Americans don't use pram though, we say stroller

Elden Ring is trying to bring the spelling back to "gaol."

'Programme' is mostly replaced by 'program'.

We can still pronounce it correctly (with an O like 'pronounce' or 'proclaim') so there's that

I don't understand the pusher/pram one at all.

Yes, but we got the good aussie slang!

Like, "no worries". Fucking love it.

Y’all still got dual carriageways over there?

I wonder if some day in the future emojis will make their way from casual conversation into business? I guess I already use things like 👍 in semi formal work chats - it's especially useful as a way of ensuring a message isn't read sarcastically or passive aggressively. LLMs seem more than happy to plop an emoji or two into a document.

Speaking of AI I'm already noticing that poor spelling, slang and the like are almost signifiers of a human. I wonder if ways of talking that distinguish us from AI will become more common or more valuable?

It's funny, quite a few misguided souls on the threadiverse seem to think that the /s is implied.

On the internet, it never is. That's why we invented it.

I still feel like that one is a flavour-of-the-month adjustment - “literally” as an intensifier is already being replaced by “lowkey”, “deadass” etc..

To be fair, that original meaning is illogical (as in, the meaning doesn't follow from the literal words used), so it's not surprising that people misused it to have a more logical meaning.

This is one of those ones that's different whether you're in British English or American English.

The technical philosophical usage seems to mostly be on the British side of things.

“I’ve told you a million times, don’t exaggerate”

I agree, but there was a period in the '00s, or maybe early '10s, where the meaning was changing because you only ever saw it mean "figuratively", to the point where dictionaries included both meanings. I think it's settled back to its original meaning now though.

The OED actually includes the definition of literally as being what used to be the opposite of its definition nowadays, so I think that it does count as an auto-antonym (a word that means both itself, and the opposite of itself)

Also an electroboom fan :p

We were taught single space in the mid 90s, so that can't be too recent.

We…don’t do this anymore? I can’t even recall what I’ve been doing for this for the last 20 years.

LUXURY!BACKINMYDAYWEDIDNTHAVESPACES.DONTGETMESTARTEDONTHISLOWERCASENONSENSE

Print publishing has 500 years of convention built on trial and error.

As a person who learned to type on a typewriter, and then became a typesetter and publisher, and now does a lot of editing, double spaces are only of use in a monospace type face where there is no kerning possible.

Otherwise, type with variable spaces between the letters plus variable letter sizes is physically harder to read when there are extra gaps between the sentences, despite the way you were trained (by boomers, probably) to type.

In pre-secondary education I was taught to double-space, but post I was told to single IIRC. I prefer single personally.

Interestingly, typing two spaces on my phone is replaced by a period and a single space. It's like a vestigial mechanic from that practice. It's aware of the context of what a double space was used for, but it serves a totally different purpose to not have to type a period.

Us that technically a missing Oxford comma, or just a missing comma?

The rich couple, me and ScarJo donated ten thousand dollars to a local charity school.

From my cold dead hands!!

I think any word sounds more childish with ed on the end! "I wented fishinged at the beached and casteded"

That makes me very uncomfortabilityable

I've never heard this one. I guess I'm getting old.

I still use them. I find it makes reading and finding sentences easier in a paragraph. There was a study that it had an impact

Plenty of bad grammar and speling to go around.

30 years ago fewer people with literacy problems were publicly and obsessively defacing literary norms.

propositions

Hey sexy mama, wanna kill all humans?

"This is the sort of bloody nonsense up with which I will not put." - attributed to Churchill

The preposition one is what I came to say.