You provided three examples of this “potentially confusing ambiguity.” Let’s look at them:
Are you saying Charlie Munger might think the Democrats’ tax plan is mentioned on page 326 of the DSM-IV and has treatment plans including cognitive behavioral therapy and a regimen of medication? Because that’s absurd. He’s using it as an intensifier.
Are you saying that a Republican congressman might not be referencing a literal God when he talks about vaccines as a gift from the big G? Because that’s absurd. He’s using it in the concrete sense of a Biblical, y’know, literalist.
Are you saying that the mayor of St. Paul believes we all have the same first name? Because that’s absurd: he’s intensifying his metaphor.
It beggars belief to claim there’s ambiguity in these uses.
Is he? There is nothing in the standard dictionary definition of “insane” that requires it to be described in the DSM-IV. Furthermore, according to Oxford Languages, when applied to the description of an act or a policy, “insane” can mean “extremely foolish; irrational or illogical”. Thus the statement could well be using “literally” in a perfectly standard, non-hyperbolic sense, and not as a generic intensifier. Or not. I don’t know, because it’s ambiguous.
Is he? Did you watch the interview? If you did, you would have seen that this is a level-headed physician who stressed in the interview the tremendous hard work of medical researchers who turned out vaccines of amazing efficacy in record time. “It’s truly a gift”, were his exact words. “A gift from God” was a variant he mentioned later. Does this sound like a religious nutter, a Biblical literalist? Is everyone who says “Thank God!” when something good happens necessarily a Biblical literalist? Maybe he is, maybe he isn’t; we don’t know. Again, you’re alleging certainty about something that is inherently ambiguous.
No, I’m very obviously not saying that. But what is the mayor saying? That we are all in some sense exactly like George Floyd? Does he mean that we actually are, in some literal sense at some fundamental level, or is this some sort of vague metaphor? I have no idea. What I do know is that the word “literally” here contributes exactly nothing to improving comprehension or enhancing any metaphor, if indeed there is one.
What an odd statement. It should be obvious by now that “enthusiasm for the adroit use of language” is one of my strong traits. It’s why I respect great writers, and one reason I became a great fan of P.G. Wodehouse and collector of many of his original editions – he had a wonderful and unique way of playing with language and evoking brilliant imagery. To describe any of my views as “classist” is absurd and rather insulting, since I have never said or implied – and do not believe – that good writing or bad writing has any predictable correlation with the writer’s social or economic stratum.
If you genuinely cannot tell that he’s using the phrase “literally insane” to mean “really really really bad idea,” that’s not on him. His meaning is perfectly clear, and you’re doing a crazy amount of work to act like it’s not.
The rest of what you say is similarly silly, so I’ll leave it there.
No you are confusing the position as so many do. It does not have contradictory meanings. It has one meaning but it is often used figuratively, as an intensifier. It is not used to mean figuratively.
Imagine if it were extremely common for people to use the term “house-sized” figuratively, as an intensifier, to a degree such that the term “house-sized” was more often used hyerbolically (eg “I saw a house-sized mouse yesterday”) than to actually refer to things that were “house-sized”. Would this mean that “house-sized” had come to mean “much smaller than a house”? No of course not. It would just be a term - like literally - that has come to be used more figuratively than literally.
Nope, you aren’t quite getting it. It is not being used to mean virtually. It is being used - hyperbolically - to mean “literally”. Again, @Richard_Pearse nails it and you need to read his example again. There is no “second meaning” to “literally” used in his sentence any more than there is a second meaning to “miles away”.
Both examples involve terms being used in their original meaning but hyperbolically. Nobody has any trouble accepting this concerning “miles away” or “house-sized”. But what trips people up about use of “literally” in exactly the same way is that the very word that means “not hyperbolically” is being used hyperbolically.
And this is what literally causes people’s heads to asplode.
The problem with this rationalization is that multiple dictionaries clearly and unambiguously disagree with it (see post #66; the appropriate link to Merriam-Webster is this, and the link to the OED is this ).
Specifically,
You can hardly claim that there is “no second meaning” to “literally” when both Merriam-Webster and the venerable OED, providing the perspectives of both American and British English, explicitly break out this second meaning in a separate definition. The OED goes so far as to flag that secondary meaning as “colloquial”.
You can hardly claim that the figurative use of “literally” does not mean “virtually” when both M-B and the OED explicitly use that word in their definition!
You can hardly keep insisting that the figurative use of “literally” means exactly the same thing as its original meaning when the OED explicitly states that such usage is “often considered irregular in standard English since it reverses the original sense of literally (‘not figuratively or metaphorically’)”.
I suppose you could try to take the position that the dictionaries are simply wrong, but that’s a pretty heavy lift.
I have no problem with an expression like “miles away” being used metaphorically. What I do have a problem with, for reasons that should be obvious, is “literally miles away” being used metaphorically.
Note the “a” and “c.” That is how the OED differentiates between different meanings of the same word. I think the OED has studied the matter in far more depth than anyone on this board. My use of “contronym” might be wrong, but my main assertion that there are two different meanings still holds.
And there’s the ball game. I am utterly baffled why you are choosing this hill to die on. (Note that you’re not doing so literally but metaphorically.) No prescriptivist fails to make a distinction between colloquial spoken language and formal written language. They are literally, not figuratively, two different modes of speech, with different usages and grammars. Using one to judge performance in the other has been warned against in style guides dating back more than a century, since even Fowler’s Modern English Usage did so. Literally is an intensifier and must be understood that way.
Who understands it? I nominate Stan Carey at Sentence First. He seems to summarize everything I want to say on the subject, and with better examples.
I’d like to quote it all, but I’ll stick with two side comments:
the word does seem to bring out the crazy, pedantry-wise.
Michael Rundell at Macmillan Dictionary Blog has written a clear and thoughtful post about literally . After looking at (literally) a thousand examples from their corpus, and showing where and how potential problems lie, he finds that “the writer’s meaning was always perfectly clear”, and concludes that “the ‘problem’ use of literally looks like just another form of hyperbole”.
Consider how the entry for literally in Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage analyzes the semantic drift of literally . This narrative, which is not as well known as it deserves to be, follows the Oxford English Dictionary’s entry through four stages.
The first … means “in a literal manner; word for word”: the passage was translated literally. The second … means “in a literal way”: some people interpret the Bible literally. The third … could be defined “actually” or “really” and is used to add emphasis. It seems to be of literary origin. […] The purpose of the adverb in [these] instances is to add emphasis to the following word or phrase, which is intended in a literal sense. The [fourth,] hyperbolic use comes from placing the same intensifier in front of some figurative word or phrase which cannot be taken literally.
This post led to the good stuff: a statistical review of how “literally” is used as an adverb
I don’t dispute that, though I might note that the distinction is not between spoken and written language, but between formal and colloquial usage in either context.
In any case, the point that I’ve made many times is that the figurative (or hyperbolic, if you prefer) use of “literally” is a stylistic choice that I think should usually be avoided, especially in writing. I have acknowledged that in the hands of a skilled writer, however, it can be used to evoke effective imagery.
The gist of my previous lengthy response to @Princhester is not about that. It’s about the fact that he and Richard_Pearse have made a number of statements that are just flat-out contradicted by the two leading dictionaries of American and British English.
What I find interesting is this statement by Mark Liberman:
I doubt that the legions of peevers who believe that literal should only be used to mean “not figurative” will even notice Prof. Dawkins’ usage, much less work themselves into a froth over it. That’s because his usage occupies a sort of middle ground, whose inconsistency with the “word for word” and “not figurative” meanings is subtle rather than blatant.
It’s been frequently pointed out that respected writers have long used “literally” in the figurative sense, but my counter to this is that when they’ve done so, they’ve generally done it in a way that skillfully intensifies a metaphor that is closely aligned with a literal reality.
I continue not to understand why you keep harping on “respected writers” when none of the rest of us are talking about them. Nor have you given an example of their false usages in writing. You’re not even pretending to acknowledge what we’re saying, which is more than just frustrating.
Wow, seems I kicked off a lengthy debate here. Might as well throw in my two cents. As stated in the original post, I dislike this use of “literally”, but not for its ambiguity (I admit that, in most cases, it’s not actually ambiguous, as has been argued by others). To me this is a case of what I would call semantic inflation. People take a word that has a rather strong meaning (and “literally” in the sense of “not figuratively” does have a strong meaning, because it protects a statement from being rejected as a badly chosen metaphor) and avail themselves of this strong meaning in order to intensify a claim they’re making. But they do this also in situations where this strong meaning does not correctly apply, and in doing so they devalue the word and make it unusuable (or at least severely weakened) for situations where this meaning really does apply.
But if, as you concede, this definition does not introduce ambiguity, how does it make the original meaning unusable? If it’s clear when it’s meant literally, and when it’s meant figuratively, then how is the literal usage impacted?
It is impacted by being weakened from previous usage where the stronger meaning of the word didn’t apply. Suppose I want to express my anger that I was the last person in a given group to be told about something (to use an example that others have used in this thread). I might say “I was the last person to hear about this.” If I was actually the xth person in a group of x people to hear about this, I might say “I was literally the last person to hear about this.” This is a stronger claim than the claim without the “literally”, because it asserts that I was not simply one of the last people to hear about it, but the very last person. Yet, as a consequence of the frequent use of “literally” to mean “figuratively”, the word has lost much of its power because people have grown used to hear it in this weaker meaning. As a result, my statement doesn’t get intensified from the inclusion of the word the way it deserves to be. To me, this is not an issue of ambiguity.
I assume this is directed at me, though I find it utterly perplexing. There’s apparently some huge disconnect in our understanding of each other.
It’s not true that "the rest of us are not talking about [respected writers]. @Miller brought up a list way back in post #16 specifically to show that famous writers have used “literally” in the figurative sense. I have been trying, as carefully and patiently as I can, to explain why I think the use of “literally” in these contexts has merit, and it relates to what I quoted the linguist Mark Liberman saying about inconsistency with the “word for word” and “not figurative” meanings being subtle rather than blatant, or as I put it, metaphors that are close to a literal reality.
As for “Nor have you given an example of their false usages in writing”, I don’t know what that means. I’ve tried as best I could to methodically describe examples of what I regard as both the good and the bad usages of “literally”.
And finally, “You’re not even pretending to acknowledge what we’re saying”. I’m sorry, but I don’t understand that either. What am I not acknowledging?
The problem is, your explanation is basically a tautology. “Using this word in that way makes you a bad writer, unless you’re a good writer, in which case using it that way is good, actually.” It just comes across as post-hoc ass covering after your initial position was shot down.
Except that’s not at all what I said. I provided a methodical analysis in which I tried to explain why the figurative usages you cited were effective writing because of the way they evoked appropriate imagery. That’s not a tautology. The fact that you didn’t like my analysis is a different issue.
Nor is it in any way “post-hoc ass covering after [my] initial position was shot down” – the post in which I made those arguments was my first post in this thread, so it could hardly have been “post-hoc” after being “shot down”!