I’m pedantic by nature, but social media has pretty much cured me. It’s just so irritating watching people smugly nitpick stuff like this when the meaning is perfectly clear.
Someday I’ll learn to never use the word “unbelievable” to convey hyperbole on the Internet, because it ALWAYS results in a ton of replies from people who feel an intense need to tell me that “well actually, it IS Believable.”
As someone who is by nature ploddingly literal (which really shows up when I am being coached in a gym) I def try and make sure I'm not misreading something. I still fail sometimes.
There was an utterly horrendous Facebook trend in about 2014 called Spellcheck A Racist where smug people would write grammar analysis (some, ironically, wrong!) whenever some racist made a typo. It fought zero racism, and also cured me of my pedantry
I sometimes catch myself doing a lot of this and I think it is often my neurodiverse brain when tired or stress just reacts before I catch up and go "no, there is context people are hardly ever literal and we know this stop saying stuff"
I REALLY hate 'carnage' for chaos, though. It's so redolent of chunks of flesh, and in certain contexts can make you think there's been hideous death when there hasn't been, eg a road accident just causing tailbacks.
Someone did this to me irl yesterday – with the most pretentious "Oh quite the opposite! In fact I'd say it's very 'on-brand'!" after I made a point about how the Tory betting scandal was quintessential Tory
I foolishly finished it with "Unbelievable", and they just went for it like a vulture
