If my car breaks down and I have to wait a few hours for somebody to pick me up, I'm stranded.

Awful anology.

The constant in all the news cycles is about how they've been stranded all this time. Which isn't just a bit misleading, its a flat out lie.

Even when starliner departed, they werent standed. There was litterally an emergency plan prepared for how they'd get them home if they had to, and made modifications to the existing crew 8 ship to allow for this. This was all covered in the briefing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AGOswKRSsHc

So once again, nobody was stranded. They could've come home at any point if they needed to.

The definition of stranded is litterally "left without the means to move from somewhere." which is VERY clearly not the case.

You're leaning on some "ackshully technically" definition of stranded. The fact that they had emergency contingencies in place the whole time doesn't invalidate the fact that they were stranded in the common colloquial sense of the term.

If I'm at work and my car breaks down, I'm stranded. I call my buddy to pick me up, and if there is an emergency I can ask a coworker to drive me home, but I'd rather not inconvenience them and so I am stranded until my buddy comes.

The word stranded is almost never used to describe scenarios where literally no contingency exists, because such scenarios almost never happen in modern live. To insist on such pedantry would be to effectively retire the word from common parlance.

If your car breaks down but you decide to wait for the tow truck even though you have a backup car ready to go in case things get bad are you still "stranded"?

If that backup car is being held in reserve in case other people who are intending to stay where I am have an emergency, then yes.

This is a really fascinating case of words having a venacular meaning that become fuzzy out of their normal domain. Could the astronauts have gone back to Earth in an emergency? Yes. Did they have the freedom to leave earlier? Sortof but not really. Could NASA have paid SpaceX another $200 million for an extra mission to pick up in December/January? Probably.

If your car breaks down a couple of miles from home and you call a friend and tell him you're stranded, are you lying? What if it's 20 miles away? But uber exists? What if uber is extremely expensive right now at $2000? But there's a guy next to you offering to sell you a bicycle?

In the end, to ask the question "were they stranded?" we have to unpack "stranded" and figure out what is the question we actually want answered. Is it about the feelings of the astronauts? Their preferences? The danger level they're in? Is it about Boeing's culpability? Is it about whether we can safely call Trump a liar? Musk?

The classic: https://www.readthesequences.com/Disguised-Queries

This has the same flaw as the other person who replied to me.

Using the car anology only works if you also say you've got another car following you at all times, fully fuled and capable of getting you home, in which case, no, you are not stranded.

Stranded implies they cant get home. Not that it costs more, or is inconvenient. The litteral definition is "left without the means to move from somewhere".

I'm afraid you'll find far more non-literal uses of "stranded" than you will find literal ones if you looked at how humans actually use words.

In fact, I'd be surprised if even 1 in 100 actual uses of the word in, say, 2023 matched the definition you've given.

"Left by your friends in an empty car park? Well, there's technically an unlocked bicycle over there..."

I see this is a pointless conversation if we're now saying words don't mean what they mean. You do you.

Words mean what people think they mean. People often mean slightly different (or very different!) things when using the same word. Often words are used non-literally. This all seemed too obvious to mention before now.

The point is not the definition of the word stranded. They were up there for much longer than they expected or planned. That involved some amount of hardship. (Missing their families for months, if nothing else.) Bringing them back was not an appropriate opportunity to make it about how bad Trump thinks Biden is.