Ha ha, great analogy. I love it.
Thank you
I think a lot of people confused Strunk & White with a linguistics textbook. Can that be considered a mistake?
What’s your opinion on acceptability judgment tasks, in which participants are asked to rate various sentences?
In my view, they illustrate the difference between prescriptivism and descriptivism in that the idea is to see whether a series of sentences make sense to native speakers. Some of the acceptable sentences may not be “correct” in the prescriptivist view of grammar, but people understand and use them without thinking twice about it. Hence, for a descriptivist, they provide perfectly valid data on how languages are actually used.
I’ve read that book. The first third was quite accessible. The second third was tough. The last part was pretty much lost on me.
I really liked the fact that he used examples from a relatively wide range of languages. It was a refreshing change from the often heavily English-focused articles and books that I’d read before. Obviously, if we’re going to develop a “universal grammar”, we’d better make sure that the model works for all languages, not just English and a few other European ones.
The chronological approach was interesting in that it helped understand how certain notions were developed, refined and sometimes replaced or abandoned but it made me feel like we had to start from scratch with each chapter.
I’ll take a look at the videos, thanks!
Here’s my test of whether it’s a mistake: if you ask the speaker, “Did you mean X, and here’s the definition, instead of Y, and here’s the definition,” would the speaker immediately agree with you they meant to say X?
I was reading a smutty fantasy last night, and although it’s well-written, at one point a character thought about how he’d “flaunted the laws” of his home city. I guarantee that if I pointed that out to the author, she’d say, “Ah shit, I meant ‘flouted’.” It was a mistake.
But many times when people use “literally” as an intensifier, it’s the word they meant to use. If you say, “Didn’t you mean ‘metaphorically’?” they’ll probably think you’re an obnoxious pedant. It’s not a mistake, it’s just a usage you don’t care for. It’s using the nonstandard salad fork, not putting salt in your coffee instead of sugar.
Actually, putting a little bit of salt in your coffee is surpringly yummy, as I discovered serendipitously.
It’s like the old saying, Vox populi vox Dei.
All right.
Indeed, if I’m not mistaken, linguists talk about unacceptable/acceptable sentences in that context, not “mistakes”.
That’s a more useful paradigm.
There is probably a role for the entomology etymologist, especially when studying moths. In the 18th century or thereabouts, a whole lexicon of bizarre names were given to moths in an attempt to distinguish between them.
The Mother Shipton, Chimney Sweeper, Vapourer, Setaceous Hebrew character, Maiden’s Blush, Carpet, Peach Blossom, Angle Shades, Confused, Argus, Drinker, Herald, Conformist, Sprawler, Phoenix, Saxon, Large Yellow Underwing, Tiger, Elephant Hawk, Hummingbird Hawk…
…for instance the Vapourer moth; most websites nowadays say that it is named after the pheromones it exudes, but I seem to remember that older books defined a ‘vapourer’ as a loud, obnoxious, talkative person - a braggart; the vapourer moth is quite a dull adult moth, but its caterpillar is quite spectacular, and this may be the origin of the term ‘vapourer’. After all, every moth exudes pheromones, but they didn’t know that back when they were doling out names.
Salt in coffee was one of the few things that Andrew Zimmern found utterly disgusting. But it was in some African tribe, so it might have been some kind of specialized coffee that didn’t lend itself well to salting.
Sure, but that’s only an argument against a hypothetical blanket prohibition on ever using “literally” to introduce a metaphor. Those who object to such usage in many cases are really objecting to it for a more nuanced reason. Consider a statement like “I was literally dying of thirst”. Unless you were actually near death, what does “literally” add to the expressiveness of the sentence? Isn’t “dying” hyperbolic enough without needing to be intensified? The only purpose of “literally” in a construction like this would be to assure the reader that it was not hyperbole. And then you have ridiculous constructions like “When I heard the news my head literally asploded!”. Say what?
Now compare that to something like “She was so radiantly beautiful she literally glowed”. A fine metaphor, and a fine use of “literally”.
The point here being that there’s nothing wrong with using “literally” in a metaphorical sense. No reasonable person would ask the hypothetical question you suggest. What they might ask, if intending to be critical, is “are you sure that’s a good metaphor?”
The real issue with using “literally” as an all-purpose intensifier isn’t that it should never be used that way, it’s that it’s often a marker of bad writing, intensifying appallingly bad metaphors and making them worse. It’s not a linguistic problem, it’s an aesthetic one.
Ermagerd, that was not an invitation to relitigate the issue. It was a distinction between mistakes and disagreements.
Fair enough. There were other posts I didn’t reply to because it would have been a hijack of Johanna’s intent for this thread. I couldn’t resist jumping in on this one because I thought you were misunderstanding the actual substantive objection to the metaphorical use of “literally”. I agree this is not the place for that argument. I will shut up now. 
Well, there it is in a nutshell. Shake on that. 
I disagree. As I said, I feel people use literally as a general intensifier; they don’t think of the word as having a specific meaning by itself. Saying “I fell over laughing” means you laughed really hard. Saying “I literally fell over laughing” also means you laughed really hard.
It’s like the word fucking. Some people throw it into sentences as a general intensifier. They’d say “I fucking fell over laughing.” As you can see these usages imply that the words fucking and literally have the same meaning - ie no real meaning. They’re just being used as fillers in the sentence because the speaker wanted to throw in extra words.
The problem in this case, is that the secondary use of literally as a meaningless intensifier undermines its primary use as a word that has an actual meaning.
Let’s say I heard a really good joke and began laughing very hard. So hard that I lost my balance and tumbled to the ground while still laughing. To communicate this, I could tell you that I fell over laughing. But I realize that falling over laughing is a common metaphor and you might assume I was using that phrase as such. So I tell you that I literally fell over laughing. That’s using the primary meaning of literally. In this case, saying “I literally fell over laughing” is communicating a different message than “I fell over laughing”. And this communicative usage is what what were losing.
But that kind of thing is normal. We had a word that meant to drown (or bury) and thus metaphorically to decisively defeat. That word was “whelm.” But people wanted something better - more emphatic and dramatic- and “overwhelm” was created, and eventually completely replaced “whelm” (indeed, these days “whelm” is used jocularily to indicate a situation that isn’t very impressive. We’ve lost one word - but we’re human. We’ll invent another when we need one.
The objection I have is the lack of context clues.
If I say “I fucking fell over laughing” people can tell from the context that I am using fucking as an intensifier. The sentence makes no sense if I’m using fucking to mean having sex.
But if I say “I literally fell over laughing” there’s no context clues to tell whether I’m using the word literally in its primary or secondary sense.
Nothing in your post seems to disagree with what I posted. I wasn’t arguing that this is a fine use of “literally”; I was arguing that it is not a mistake.
Basically, some people prescribe word usage (almost invariably the usage learned in their formative years) and apply opprobrium to those who vary from their prescriptions (often those with less social status). This has nothing to do with the science of linguistics, despite their sometime use of linguistic terminology. To those who’ve studied and experienced multiple languages and cultures, prescriptivists look provincial and incurious. There’s nothing wrong with using language in a particular way, it’s the expectation that any particular way is inherently better or worse than any other.