Quote Originally Posted by wes4dbt View Post
So, it wasn't the truth.
You just taught me something new. I just realized that you guys have no idea how to interpret figurative language. You guys struggle with similes, metaphors, hyperbole, litotes, oxymorons etc. I tend to use a lot of these in my non-technical posts. One could make the argument that I use them poorly and that might certainly be true, but sapator seems to understand me perfectly and English isn't even his first language. I'm also pretty confident that dil understands me as well.

When I said Covid wasn't real, Shaggy took it quite literally but what I actually used here was a combination of hyperbole and something called a metonymy. The basic idea is a metonymy is that a word is used as a stand in for another idea. Eg. The crown has failed to quell the rebellion. In this case the crown means the King, not the physical crown itself.

Earlier in this thread, I told Tyson something along the lines of half the country voted for Trump, so it might be a good idea to listen to what they have to say. I employed hyperbole or perhaps it was synecdoche, I'm not sure. In either case, it completely went over his head. The point was that the number of people who voted for him is far too significant to be casually dismissed. He completely missed that and went off on some irrelevant tangent about the number not being half the people.

I told you that 95% of this thread is people inventing narratives about how Trump will destroy the universe, an obvious hyperbole if ever there was such a thing. Yet, you completely missed the point, which was that a noticeable amount of the content in this are complaints about Trump, many of which are the most pessimistic predictions about what his actions might lead to. Yet, all you could focus on is if it is actually 95% of the posts.

Fear not though. It's 2025. From now on, every non-technical post I make, I will pass it through an LLM and ask it to remove all literary devices like metaphors and hyperbole. I will ask it to translate my posts into the dry and colourless language of academics which may prove to be more suitable for precise communication across cultural boundaries.