What if you just think of it as our culture putting less emphasis on the concept of “literally” and more on “figuratively”. And the evolution actually makes the language more expressive, given the things that we’re trying to express (on average).
I don’t follow… By adding the antonym you actually make it harder to express these figurative things in the same way removing contrast from an image makes it harder to resolve, so it’s less expressive than before.
What if you just think of it as our culture putting less emphasis on the concept of “literally” and more on “figuratively”. And the evolution actually makes the language more expressive, given the things that we’re trying to express (on average).
I don’t follow… By adding the antonym you actually make it harder to express these figurative things in the same way removing contrast from an image makes it harder to resolve, so it’s less expressive than before.