Well, since I posted definitions with a heading in bold type calling them literal above other definitions under a heading in bold type calling them figurative, I would have supposed that context would have drowned any possible confusion. As I have written literally a million times on this board, Context Is Everything.
If you don’t like hearing that from me, here’s another rejoinder to you on literally.
The use of literal to overlap figurative seems to set people off more than any other usage. (Note I didn’t say modern usage. Jane Austen wrote “he literally flew.”) Yet that change in meaning is merely one of a zillion examples of the insertion of intensifiers into common speech, and thereby into writing.
All intensifiers seem to provoke prescriptivists. Look at the quantity of vile spewed over terms like very unique or extremely perfect. But in this thread alone I find “completely useless,” “kind of stuff,” “a particular word,” “don’t ever include,” “if only you poked it hard enough.” A true pedant would have run a red pen through completely, kind of, particular, ever, and hard. They are, strictly speaking, unnecessary. So is “strictly speaking.” Intensifiers are not words to be tossed aside lightly but prescriptivism should be thrown with great force; they are a variation on markup language, giving speech and writing a way to highlight importance without relying upon the tricks of tonal or written italics and bolding. They supply context by their existence, or even by their mere existence.
The rare sentence in which literally may have two possible meanings impossible to distinguish is a badly written sentence. Then again, all sentences which can have two possible meanings not parsable by context are badly written. They’re everywhere, even in otherwise good writing. We’re drowning in them.
This one is unlike the others. Two entirely distinct verbs fell together over the course of a millenium. One is cleave, cleft, cleft (as in cleft palate) while the other is cleave, cleave or clove, cleaved or cloven (as in cloven hoof). It is not really a contranym. But pitted is the one that bugs me. Are “pitted olives” olives with pits or olives with pits removed.
Today’s NYTimes magazine has an article on bimonthly, biweekly, etc. The conclusion is the confusion. Don’t use them because no one can know what you mean. For example, my pay period was changed a few years ago from twice a month to every two weeks.
That one has never made any sense, because “unique” is always a comparative. If I had you 20 blue boxes and 1 yellow box, which one is the unique one? They all are, because no two of the 20 blue boxes has quite the same precise arrangement of atoms. If “unique” is to have any meaning at all, then it can only be used in a comparative sense.
Unique is often cited as a word that should never be modified, and it presents a special case because of the evolution of its meanings. It comes from the Latin word unus (“one”), and its original meanings in English were “being the only one” or “sole” and “having no like or equal” or “unequaled.” These meanings are about as absolute as they can be, and are seldom modified. However, words that are in widespread use have a tendency to take on extended meanings, and unique also came to mean something that was unusual or rare, as in “a unique opportunity” or “a unique feature.” The fact is, the original (and most absolute) meaning of unique is the word’s least commonly used meaning today (meaning “sole” or “only,” as in “the unique copy of my manuscript”). But modifying unique when it means “unusual” is common:
I’m astounded the NY Times found this interesting enough for an entire article. Slow news day?
Ambiguities are everywhere in daily life, in all forms of communication. It seems to me that by far the simpler solution to them is to simply provide more clarity and context, rather than a dictionary measuring contest.
Is there some alternative world that pedants and prescriptivists live in where this is not the case, where dictionaries actually rule the day and they’d prefer to argue over one rather than simply ask “which did you mean?” Outside of the SDMB and Scrabble tournaments, I mean.
You’re right. Cleave, cleaved, cleaved comes from an old verb meaning join as you said. That’s called a weak conjugation. Cleave, clove, cleft or cloven comes from a verb meaning split and is a strong conjugation (except cleft which is called irregular weak). But anyway, they come from unrelated roots and not really a contranym.
