No, see my post above. Your example is of someone being figurative, but he is not using the word “literally” to indicate that he is being figurative, he is using it as hyperbole.
Condescend - originally meant treating one’s social inferiors as equals.
Now means to patronize.
I’m honestly confused by this; you seem to be saying verbal irony can not be deliberate. That does not square with… well, with my 38 years of speaking English, as well as what “irony” means as far as I’m aware (and “irony” means more than one thing.) Can you perhaps provide some examples?
It’s hard to provide examples of something that I think is rare-to-nonexistent.
How about you offer an example of what you might consider to be a deliberately ironic statement?
“Irony,” like any word, can have multiple uses, but I am talking about a specific concept, the concept of irony. Sarcastic jokes aren’t ironic. They’re just jokes.
Momentarily. Its definition is “for a moment”, but the meaning has been changed to “in a moment”, thanks largely to the airline industry. I really don’t want my plane leaving the ground momentarily.
Okay, it’s not an opposite, but it annoys the crap outta me.
I think you are being far to generous. To use a word as hyperbole, that by definition means “I am not using hyperbole”, would be stupid. I think what is happening is that we have lots of people that don’t know the meaning of the word. They know it is a modifier, and they recognize the usual sentence construction, (literally, followed by an eggagerated statement), and have no idea that it makes no sense, or could be misleading.
I’ve read that the word “prove” originally meant “test”. The “proving ground” means the testing ground, not a place where something proves its worth. Also “the proof of the pudding is in the eating” means that this is where the true test of the pudding is.
The writer of the above was explaining the expression “the exception proves the rule”. His point was that it originally meant, logically enough, that “the exception tests the rule”, in that unless you have some explanation the rule is refuted. Nowadays, the word prove has come to mean “conclusively demonstrate”, and the phrase has come to have the opposite meaning that it originally had.
One meaning of discipline - the sense of “being a learner” (from the Latin discipulus, student or learner, and discere, to learn) - has given way to the sense of “being a master”: not so much a giver of learning as of control, dominance, or punishment. Self-discipline is not substantially different - it simply means controlling or dominating oneself.
This makes no sense whatever. You are disagreeing with me but at the same time your own logic leads you (or should lead you) to exactly what I am saying. You are saying these people don’t know the meaning of the word but that they are using it as a modifier. Agreed. What do they mean by the modifier? They may not fully understand the meanings involved but they know that “literally” can emphasise a description and they are using the word even when their description is not actually correct.
You say “To use a word as hyperbole that by definition means ‘I am not using hyperbole’ would be stupid”. Whether it is stupid or not is a value judgement, but the fact is people use words to emphasise that are blatantly incorrrect all the time.
“Honestly” “really” and “very” are all words of emphasis, often used when someone is being dishonest, not talking about something real, and not talking with verity, yet they literally once meant honest, real and veritable.
Do you think when someone says, “Honestly, the mouse I saw was very much the size of a house, literally, it really was” that they mean to say that they are not being honest, that they are not speaking with verity, that they are being figurative and that the size of mouse they are conveying to you is not real?
Of course not. They are saying to you that it was a big mouse, and they are emphasising that four different ways.
Good grief. They are not saying that it is actually the size of a house, even if they are saying it’s big. Therefore they are saying it’s figuratively as big as a house. So absolutely yes if they say the size of the mouse is literally that of a house they are in fact also saying that the size they are conveying is absolutely not real.
All the bizarre attempts to try to justify the idea that they have some legitimate reason for saying what they are saying instead of just being too stupid to know they picked the wrong word are really falling flat here. The more you talk around it and try to excuse it the less sense you make.
I thought that was becoming a soprano.
There’s a good example of this in Hamlet, Act I, Scene 4! Hamlet wants to follow the Ghost, and Horatio and Marcellus try to stop him. Hamlet says:
“Unhand me, gentlemen. By heaven, I’ll make a ghost of him that lets me!”
“Let” meant “stop” in Shakespeare’s time, and now it means the exact opposite.
You need to get to grips with the difference between speaking figuratively (which is what they are doing) and explicitly saying that one is speaking figuratively.
I’ve been over this before but answer this simple question:
1/ “the mouse was as big as a house!”
2/ “the mouse was literally as big as a house!”
In which sentence am I trying to emphasise the size of the house more?
Answer this and we can talk more.
My main problem with using “literally” as hyperbolic emphasis is that it creates ambiguity–when someone uses “literally” literally, people may have a tendency to assume they’re just exagerrating. So now we need a whole new word that *literally *means literally.
Ivan the Terrible got that name in spite of, not because of, his, well, “terrible” personality. He’s sometimes instead called John the Awesome, in English.
And of course “pretty awful” would be a terrible way to describe a girl who’s awfully pretty.
One can find more of these antonyms if one goes back to English’s sources. If you’re given a poison you might then want an antidote potion even though these two words derive from the same Latin root.
(BTW, my pet peeve is “exponential” which today is more likely to be applied to fast linear growth than to slow geometric growth.)
Yeah, that’s the main issue. What word should we use when we want to actually emphasize the word literally?
Like when someone is listening to a used car salesman and says “I am up to my knees in bullshit! Literally!”
vs
Someone who’s tending some bulls and accidentally steps in a big pile of dung.
“I am up to my knees in bull shit! Literally!”
Silly example but you see my point. The second person can’t express their actual condition if literally is just used meaninglessly like in the first example.
“Blow” means “suck”.
Only in a specific context. 
Similarly, when we say we doubt something has taken place, we mean we think it hasn’t, but when Hamlet says, “I doubt some foul play,” it means he thinks it has occurred. Yet the word “doubt” often occurs in Shakespeare in its modern sense as well.
The version I’ve heard had it as “awful, pompous, and artificial”, with pompous meaning something like splendid. Only “awful” seems to have entirely flipped meanings; artificial and pompous have had their connotations change considerably but not done a full 180 in denotation.