This _is_ language. A noun can involve an idea, for the things that cannot be observed.

But what idea is "a myriad?"

Language is alive, it doesn't follow formulas

Rules build around language, not the other way around

Yes, and websters literally defined literally to follow figuratively. If you don't allow for some prescriptive language, you just get confusion.

And you set precedents to destroy language altogether

But you do that post hoc

You don't just tell people how to talk, and then they talk like that, you let them talk and observe it and then write it down to show how it's being used

"A myriad" is a new thing. It previously was not considered a noun. Hell I've got a late 19th century dictionary that proved that.

That happens all the time with language

It was simply perverted, and now you can reference something as a noun without defining what that noun actually is

Because now it's a noun that requires another noun to define it.

Well so be it

It's literally an adjective pretending to be a noun

Then it's now both

A linguistic anomaly, which didn't used to be a thing, but since people didn't know that "A myriad" was not a thing, and nobody corrected them, they continue to use it incorrectly

So now you're confused when I try to ask you what "a myriad" is.

Like I said, this happens all the time

Show me this singular myriad.

You make me want to metaphorically blow my brains out in a myriad of ways.

A ton of other things used to mean something else

I used the adjective version of the word

But anything that has changed meaning was often descriptive. There are prescriptive words.

Such as "literally"

Which is meant to mean exactly as you see it, and as it happened.

Now we also allow using it as the literal antonym: figuratively.

So now the word becomes a confusion. You cannot trust that when something says that something "literally" happened, we have permitted it to also mean it might only have figuratively happened.

That's a form of hyperbole, people do that all the time

Like when they say "all my life I've been waiting"

No they haven't been waiting all their life

Because as babies they couldn't have waited

They weren't aware of what they would be waiting for

It literally means the same thing

But it *doesn't*

Because both are distinct, yes?

Even tho they mean the exact same thing

Wait what

So when someone says "I'm literally dead" and they stand before you, still quite very alive, do you think they may have used the word incorrectly?

*"A* countless or extremely great number"
"countless or extremely great *IN* number"

Definitely literally not the same