• Hawke@lemmy.world
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    4 days ago

    People can’t “still” be doing something that they were NOT doing before!

    An individual cannot but a group of people can.

    “Children are still fascinated by sticks” is as true as always, even though the individual children have mostly grown up, grown old, and died.

    • tiramichu@lemm.ee
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      4 days ago

      Of course. And that’s because “still” has two meanings. One being “the same now as always” and the other being “in a continuing state, uninterrupted”

      Which one the reader will interpret is dependent on context.

      “75% of children still fascinated by sticks” is very likely to mean different groups of children surveyed years apart - the ‘unchanged’ meaning.

      “14% of adults over 50 still keep a pair of 80s flared jeans in their wardrobe” is very likely to mean it is the same adults who were wearing them back in the 80s - the ‘uninterrupted’ meaning.

      The problem is that for this article, neither of those valid meanings make sense - at least not to me.

      It is not ‘uninterrupted’ because we know that lots of people stopped playing old systems, while other people joined the hobby.

      It is also not ‘unchanged’, because the levels of people playing 90s consoles will have dipped to a low somewhere in the middle and then bounced back thanks to renewed interest and modern hobbyist technologies that make these things more accessible now than they were just 10 years ago.

      It’s altogether a different situation now than it was then, and that’s why I find “still” to be a poor choice of phrase regardless of the meaning intended.