I like the Wiktionary definition which is "based on precise facts". Consider the following example:
I earn $9,000 per year and live
comfortably, although technically I am
below the poverty line.
"Technically" is used to introduce the contrasting observation that although the author considers herself well-off, she is in fact a pauper based on a precise definition of poverty. This use of "technically" to provide contrast seems typical.
I would not agree that "technically" and "literally" are interchangeable. "Literally" refers to the literal as opposed to figurative meaning of a word or phrase.
I was able to find a few instances of computer and car products being described as brutal:
one here:
Asrock 970 Pro3 promises brutal performance with 8-core AMD CPUs.
and another here:
The Mazda 6 MPS is a more refined, larger car that offers more space and luxury together with the brutal performance of it's [sic] turbocharged engine.
I'll point out that I had to wade through some irrelevant content (much of it using brutal with a negative connotation) in order to find these. You will also notice that these examples are not from major marketing campaigns. I also searched YouTube for "brutal performance" and got lots of hits for loud cars (most of the results were for rock music videos).
The intended meaning of brutal in these instances is probably some combination of strong and rugged, or perhaps even manly or interested more in power than the feelings of others. How it is actually interpreted will vary from person to person, but some people will probably receive a negative feeling from the word (I am reminded of a list of adjectives in Hobbes' Leviathan, "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short").
As for whether it is okay to use the word in marketing, that all depends on the image that you want to put forward. Sometimes a company is okay with being seen as focused on raw power rather than on other positive attributes (perhaps to attract customers who think, "I don't care if my engine is quiet, as long as it's fast!") In that case, I would say brutal is just fine to use.
Other words (possibly with different connotations) that might appear in similar marketing outlets are:
- savage
- beastly
- unrestrained
- rugged
- powerful
Best Answer
would stick out very uncomfortably in informal speech, and is pompous sounding even in academic writing. Even if a word is highly used, or rarely, it will still have other features like vulgarity/tabooness (like very common swear words), technical context (carburetor), or, as in this case, register (like perhaps or indeed). That is to say that frequency isn't the only thing that gives a word color or appropriateness.
As a style recommendation, I would not recommend using the word hubris around your football hooligan comrades, they might make you pay for the next round. And unless your tea party pals are discussing Greek tragedy, it make a monocle or two drop. But it's totally on for the crossword gang.
As to its frequency though in writing, here are the words of mostly equivalent frequency:
These terms are all easily recognizable by adults. They are not rare, but they are also not everyday words (hiker seems out of place here, I'd expect that to be much more common). These words are more educated, like impasse, humerus, and hindrance.
For perspective with the corpus used, these are around the 20140 index of frequency, where the list starts:
Those at the 30K mark are still very recognizable.
Note the Zipf pattern in action: the less frequent items will have less difference in frequency to the point that many will have the same number of occurrences and then by the extraction method I used, they are sorted alphabetically together.
This short list was created using word frequencies from https://www.researchgate.net/project/Word-prevalence-measures-for-62K-English-lemmas. The source doesn't have to be terribly accurate; a lot depends on the corpus but presumably with a large enough corpus a difference of one or two mentions may put you in a not too distant bin.