Correct! It’s called a contronym, it is such a normal thing in language that they made a word for it.
Because it blocks those government heat rays. /s
Wow! What a headline: It makes it sound like DDG was compromised by Google.
spoiler
It wasn’t.
DDG protects you from Google (knowing your search history, and which links you clicked from each search) while you are on the DDG website. Of course it doesn’t protect you from trackers once you leave DDG. For that you need other cookie and tracking blockers like PrivacyBadger, uBlockOrigin, and Firefox’s Enhanced Tracking Protection.
It is definitely an important point that up to 40% of US sites send user data to google, but that is not something unique to DDG. A more accurate headline would be “Google is tracking you even if you never use it.”
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.
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.
He is a fortunate man to be introduced to such a party of fine women at his arrival; it is literally to feed among the lilies.
-- 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.
The opposite of what? I’m curious how you interpreted my words, because that quote does not contradict any claim I intended.
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.
Primary thought; secondary (interjectory thought [aside]) thought, supporting thought that wouldn’t work as an independent sentence, digression: the actual point.
Maybe Microsoft will buy them.
That’s a contributing factor on the comparative desirability of an electric kettle here vs there, but I think the more significant part boils down to familiarity and need. Most Americans just don’t drink tea/cocoa/instant-coffee regularly enough want a separate appliance for it. And if the boiling is for cooking, most folk would just boil the water in the pot they will be cooking in, and probably with the lid off because we are lazy like that; time and energy efficiency be damned.
We all love the 1964 goth girl