I tried to train a friend not to drop the F-bomb so much by taking it literally.
Fuck, dude, where’s my fuckin’ keys?
Well, first of all, it’s where ARE…
The fuck? You gonna help me find my fuckin’ keys?
Oh, the fuckin’ ones! Well, if they’re fuckin’ so much, maybe they found a door lock to get lucky with.
**Fuck you, ya fu… hey, you’re right! Fuck yeah, found my fuckin’ keys!
**
You can see how well that worked…
Because the former president of the Mormon church is an expert on feeble brains?
Like moot. It should be interesting to see if the original meaning will survive, or if the latter opposite one takes over.
Along similar lines, the evolution of the word nice is remarkable. In modern usage it’s drifting toward a derogatory sense. If that takes hold, it will have gone full circle bad>good>bad.
[QUOTE=OxfordWords blog]
The word nice, derived from Latin nescius meaning ‘ignorant’, began life in the fourteenth century as a term for ‘foolish’ or ‘silly’. From there it embraced many a negative quality, including wantonness, extravagance, and ostentation, as well as cowardice and sloth. In the Middle Ages it took on the more neutral attributes of shyness and reserve. It was society’s admiration of such qualities in the eighteenth century that brought on the more positively charged meanings of ‘nice’ that had been vying for a place for much of the word’s history, and the values of respectability and virtue began to take over. Such positive associations remain today, when the main meaning of ‘nice’ is ‘pleasant’ (if with a hint of damning with faint praise; it may yet turn full circle).
[/QUOTE]
This conversation has literally blown my mind, figuratively speaking.
**
Rienmann**, your arguments have turned me from a mocker into a believer when it comes to the use of literally as a metaphoric intensifier. I had not previously thought of it in that way. I am literally a hater no more.
Perhaps you’re right. Your experience may have been different from mine, which may have been more narrowly oriented to linguistics. It would be ironic for me to try to dictate that a word should only be used in the sense that I prefer!
I would, however, hold to my conceptual assertion that linguistics is a science, all science is strictly empirical, and if it’s not empirical it’s not science; so linguistics and prescriptivism are mutually exclusive.
I just looked at the Wiki entry. It does emphasize the conceptual point about empiricism; but seems to want to reserve descriptivism for didactic ideology. Maybe that’s closer to your experience of the usage? In my experience descriptivism has more commonly been used as a synonym for empiricism, the belief that scientific linguistics gives us insight into the nature of language, whilst prescriptivism does not.
[QUOTE=Wikipedia]
In the study of language, description or descriptive linguistics is the work of objectively analyzing and describing how language is actually used (or how it was used in the past) by a group of people in a speech community.
All scholarly research in linguistics is descriptive; like all other sciences, its aim is to observe the linguistic world as it is, without the bias of preconceived ideas about how it ought to be.…
…Linguistic description is often contrasted with linguistic prescription, which is found especially in education and in publishing. Prescription seeks to define standard language forms and give advice on effective language use, and can be thought of as a presentation of the fruits of descriptive research in a learnable form, though it also draws on more subjective aspects of language aesthetics. Prescription and description are complementary, but have different priorities and sometimes are seen to be in conflict. Descriptivism is the belief that description is more significant or important to teach, study, and practice than prescription.
[/QUOTE]
[My bolds]
I already said I’m not a prescriptivist. So I’m allowed to have my own definition of what a prescriptivist is.
What’s your point? That person back in 1963 who said their head literally exploded would have been using the word incorrectly.
Shall we play prescriptivist misconception bingo? This is the third time just on this one page that a prescriptivist has claimed that descriptivism means “anything goes”.
I’ll re-post Geoff Pullum’s article that I put up in post #79. Please read this. If you disagree with descriptive linguistics, it behooves you to first understand what it is, otherwise you’re similar to a creationist who has learned all his biology from the bible trying to debate an evolutionary biologist.
Everything Is Correct vs Nothing Is Relevant
[QUOTE=Geoff Pullum]
[A prescriptivist commenter on Language Log] cannot see any possibility of a position other than two extremes: on the left, that all honest efforts at uttering sentences are ipso facto correct; and on the right, that rules of grammar have an authority that derives from something independent of what any users of the language actually do. But there had better be a third position, because these two extreme ones are both utterly insane…
[/QUOTE]
Yes, you’re right. I’ve been posting in this thread because my sole concern is the possibility that some people might get blinded if the word literally continues to be misused. That and gorilla rape are my only concerns. Won’t somebody think of the children?
There’s no way I was offering specific examples to illustrate a broader general point.
The only general point that can be drawn from your examples is that you feel that ambiguity should be removed from language for reasons of clarity (I will withdraw my snarky parody that it’s about Health and Safety rather than clarity).
But all language contains a vast amount of ambiguity.
One of my personal favorites is wounded pride. I have one of those “cannot unsee” things about the expression that conjures up dying lions. Should we eliminate the wonderful metaphor from the Engish language lest a vet rush to the zoo on a false alarm?
Again, nobody would dispute your right to have a subjective stylistic opinion that the use of literally as an intensifier for metaphors is something you dislike. Some of us who are arguing against you may even share that opinion. The bone of contention is when you move rapidly, as prescriptivist peevers are wont to do, into authoritarian condemnation of those who don’t share your subjective stylistic views. You have no objective grounds for your position. You’re doing the equivalent of claiming that the color blue is superior to the color orange.
Pinker is not saying what I understood you to be claiming. He laments the sometimes pedantic pronouncements of “an informal network of copy-editors, dictionary usage panelists, style manual and handbook writers, English teachers, essayists, columnists, and pundits”. Admittedly, he endorses a certain democratization of language authority, but only because common usage is occasionally right or occasionally beneficial. He cites examples of needless formalisms like rules against ending a sentence with a preposition or splitting infinitives, neither of which I’ve ever had a big problem with (hah!). Churchill’s quip about the former as “a rule up with which I will not put” has always been one of my favorite rejoinders. I think most would agree that most of the time you’d getter far better language from the likes of someone like the late William Safire than you would from the typical guy on the street. Good writers are neither staunch pedants nor are they impervious to Pinker’s insights.
So what is Pinker saying, exactly? The discussion that begins on page 378 offers excellent and illuminating examples. In examining the sentence “Everyone returned to their seats”, for instance, he cites the language mavens as claiming that it’s wrong because “everyone” – “every one” – is singular and may not serve as the antecedent of a plural pronoun like “them”. But he argues that they are not actually antecedent and pronoun, they are a “quantifier” and a “bound variable” expressing the logical relationship “For all X, X returned to X’s seat.”
This about that for a second. What’s happening here is that Pinker is denouncing what he regards as a simplistic and illogical rule that some would seek to impose and offering a more cogent analysis and a more logical rule of usage. This is a substantial part of his argument, along with other points like the fact that strict application of formal rules can create awkward constructs (which I certainly agree is problematic in informal contexts).
What I said earlier was that “… at any given point in time language is a specific body of knowledge and skills that can and should be taught [and which] … has a lexicon and an extensive set of rules governing grammar, morphology, and syntax for its written form and phonetics for the spoken form”. This seemed to cause you a great deal of consternation, but virtually the whole of Pinker’s chapter is a dissertation on precisely that body of knowledge, with extensive systematic analysis of cases where the “language mavens” are wrong and precisely why they are wrong. It’s not an abandonment of rules, it’s a better interpretation of them.
And my point is that, wrong or pedantic as the language mavens may sometimes be, the ignorant and careless misuse of language that we have to endure every day is often a good deal worse. Not everything that violates conventional rules of grammar and usage is superior and justifiable; in fact, such violations rarely benefit the language and are often detriments to communication. This observation is not the same as endorsing all of the sometimes pedantic strictures of various language authorities. It’s simply an acknowledgment that language does have rules, even if there is sometimes disagreement about them, and that they are far too often arbitrarily disregarded.
And then there are the realists, who understand that both are views are valid and both processes occur simultaneously. Which is not at all like the distinction between creationists and evolutionary biologists.
From the Wikipedia entry previously quoted:
Linguistic description is often contrasted with linguistic prescription, which is found especially in education and in publishing. Prescription seeks to define standard language forms and give advice on effective language use, and can be thought of as a presentation of the fruits of descriptive research in a learnable form, though it also draws on more subjective aspects of language aesthetics. Prescription and description are complementary, but have different priorities and sometimes are seen to be in conflict.
Then you clearly do not understand what I have been saying.
What you are saying is that you specifically want “literal” to remain pure and untouched so it can be used to get rid of any ambiguity.
A noble goal, if it wasn’t because it’s a solution for a problem that doesn’t exist. We all can tell by the context whether a word is used literally or figuratively with little to no problem. We can even tell when “literal” is used in the literal sense and when it isn’t.
[My bold]
You seem to have focused on Pinker’s analysis of specific examples of language punditry that form the bulk of the latter part of his chapter. That stuff is at the level of the discussion of literally here, it’s unimportant except to show that self-appointed language pundits like Strunk and White are generally utterly clueless in their analysis of language.
But you’ve glossed over the important part of Pinker’s discussion found in the first few pages of the chapter, where he explains why the view of language that I have bolded in your comment above is woefully myopic. Children do not learn language from their schoolteachers.
[QUOTE=Steven Pinker in “The Language Instinct” Chapter 12]
To a linguist…language is like the song of the humpback whale. The way to determine whether a construction is “grammatical” is to find people who speak the language and ask them…To a scientist, the fundamental fact of human language is its sheer improbability…What would it take to build a device that could duplicate human language? Obviously you need to build in some kind of rules, but what kind? Prescriptive rules? Imagine trying to build a talking machine by designing it to obey rules like [my snark: use literally correctly]…It would just sit there…Prescriptive rules are useless without the much more fundamental rules that create the sentences…the rules of Chapters 4 and 5 [of Pinker’s book]. These rules are never mentioned in style manuals or school grammars because the authors correctly assume that anyone capable of reading the manuals must already have the rules. No one, not even a valley girl, has to be told not to say Apples the eat boy or The child seems sleeping or…the vast, vast majority of the millions of trillions of mathematically possible combinations of words. So, when a scientist considers all the high-tech mental machinery needed to arrange words into ordinary sentences, prescriptive rules are, at best, inconsequential little decorations. The very fact that they have to be drilled shows that they are alien to the natural workings of the language system. One can choose to obsess over prescriptive rules, but they have no more to do with human language that the criteria for judging cats a cat show have to do with mammalian biology…
…Some [prescriptivists] go further and say that they are actually safeguarding the ability to think clearly and logically. This radical Whorfianism is common sense among language pundits, not surprisingly; who would settle for being a schoolmarm when one can be an upholder of rationality itself…
[/QUOTE]
On didactics:
Do you honestly think that the arguments that you and Little Nemo have been making constitute “presentation of the fruits of descriptive research in a learnable form”?
After some careful thought, I gave a descriptive analysis of what I think is going with “literally” in post #121 above. This was an ad hoc analysis based on looking for as many examples as I could find in a corpus - I could certainly be wrong, but the point is that it’s an honest effort to be empirical, to derive the underlying rules from the way people actually use the language. It may not be completely accurate, but if I were teaching a class of kids about the word, this is the kind of thing I’d present to them (or better, ask a particularly talented student to work out and present), then I’d ask them to make their minds up (a) whether as linguistic scientists they agree with this analysis of the usage; and at the end of the class (b) whether stylistically they *like *using it this way and why; ultimately suggesting that they make their own decisions about if and when they’d use it in various contexts such as an informal chat with their friends, a letter with a prospective college application, etc., and just why they might avoid it in the latter case, even if stylistically they love it (i.e. the social and politcal aspects of language). The words “right” “wrong” and above all “it’s just stupid” would never come into the stylistic discussion.
That should read post #112.
The problem you’re having here is that your examples are so ridiculous, they cut against your argument. When someone asks, “Why is this issue important?” and your response is primarily concerned with the dangers presented by horny gorillas, it’s hard not to interpret that as meaning, “Not very important at all.”
Wrong on so many points – virtually every one. Not even sure where to begin.
The examples didn’t all come at the end, and in fact the very things I quoted from page 378 were on the ninth page of a 34-page chapter. Those were points he made near the very beginning as his fundamental thesis.
The problem with vague generalities that you bandy about like the alleged cluelessness of “self-appointed language pundits” is that it’s meaningless unless one proffers specific examples of what they’re saying that is so allegedly clueless. And every time that Pinker does, as in the examples I’ve cited, it’s always been trivial minutiae of the kind that I’ve never believed in myself, and where he offers entirely rational rule-based systemic justifications for why in those cases the common usage is correct. All of this is entirely independent of the fact that we are awash with dumbasses using language badly, and which is the real subject of this thread and many others like it.
Another point I would make, completely separate from that and a different issue entirely, is that as much as one may admire Pinker – and I do, for many reasons – nevertheless the man is not infallible and not everything he says is necessarily God’s own truth. For example he purports to analyze the intonation of “I could care less” and concludes that it’s not a corruption of the original, but rather, intentionally and pointedly sarcastic. First of all I’d guess that very few users of that form even recognize that it’s not the original expression, let alone are consciously being sarcastic, but in any case there are other theories for how that expression came about that are a good deal more plausible. In short, no one knows why many people say it that way, despite Pinker’s confident assertion that he’s figured it out.
In a similar vein, Pinker seems to place an inordinate amount of faith in the innate language skills of the average person, certainly far more than I do. Perhaps he has a better circle of friends or doesn’t frequent the Internet as much as I do, but after being subjected for years to “could of” and “would of”, “their” for “there”, “then” for “than”, and a ceaseless procession of similar ignorant mistakes, I feel otherwise. And to those who maintain that I’m just being pedantic and it doesn’t impair comprehension: it does. It literally does. If you put enough of these stupidities together into a sort of evil broth of convoluted language, it can be – literally – difficult or impossible to actually discern the intended meaning.
And his examples of things like humpback whale song or dolphin swimming motions are misplaced, I think. The whale song is a means of communication that is conducive to survival. It may or may not be suboptimal, but if it was “wrong” the whales would be detrimentally affected and might not even survive as a species. If the dolphin’s swimming motions were “wrong”, the dolphin might move backwards instead of forwards or not move at all, or move so inefficiently that it couldn’t effectively forage for food. But when some moron writes so poorly that it’s both an annoyance and a struggle to understand it, his immediate survival is not threatened (unless he happens to be very close to me and I’m holding a baseball bat), but otherwise he is at liberty to procreate like mad, and produce many little morons who are equally illiterate.
And please don’t distort this into a claim that language is, or should be, static, or defined by some divine authority. Language is dynamic and it evolves for many reasons, good and bad, to both its benefit and its detriment, but language is also a human creation with structure, rules, and semantics as the fundamental basis of common understanding.
Do you have any specific examples that are not drawn from the Magical Land of Pretend? If not, have you considered that the broader general point they illustrate also resides in the Magical Land of Pretend? That in the real world, the problem does not exist?