Originally Posted by
Mal
Because we enjoy language, and words, and appreciate when they're used cleverly or in a novel way or, at bare minimum, logically. So, redundancy and overuse becomes annoying, and we feel a little sense of sorrow when a nice, innocent word like "literally" comes to be commonly used to mean "figuratively" instead. Because it's lazy and/or confusing and reminds us of our basic human coarseness and imperfection, when we'd rather be reminded of our cleverness and creativity.
Seriously, though, no one here is all that serious about being a pedant (although I'd love to debate at some point whether caring about word meaning and grammar is "reinforcing an artifical hierarchy," or whether any hierarchy can be artificial, or to what degree reinforcing it is necessarily bad). We're just expressing pet peeves, mostly based on overusage. Some phrases become banal and should be put out to pasture. Does it not connote laziness and sheeplike lack of originality that every sports team fanbase now refers to itself as "________ Nation?" It's hackneyed. Likewise, Sage has a legitimate gripe regarding the word "iconic" - it's been applied to so many things/people that it has effectively lost any real meaning beyond "unique" or "old and well-known." Expansion of or shift in meaning is easier to accept, I think, in the evolution of language, than corrosion of meaning is. "Iconic" was a nice, precise word with a very specific connotation which recognized its religious origins. Now it's tired, means nothing, and has lost any connection to its own past. I think that's too bad.
Similarly, when a word becomes a verbal tic, devoid of actual meaning in a sentence, some of us just get tired of hearing it. Even worse, when common usage evolution of a word occasionally leads to it being used to denote its generally accepted antonym, it's irritating.