I have a coworker who uses 'literally' incorrectly

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
141

You’re conflating two things in this sentence. Is it an annoyance, sometimes, to read “literally” when it’s used as an intensifier? Sure. I’m not particularly fond of it.

Is it a struggle to understand? Seriously, can you point to a time where you struggled to understand the concept someone intended to convey through a sentence containing the word “literally”? How often does that happen? Because it’s never happened in my life. Someone tells me not to look at the light because it’ll literally blind me, I don’t look at the goddamned light.

And the “moron” thing is deeply problematic. A writer may intend to use “literally” as an intensifier. She may correctly predict that her audience will understand its use as an intensifier. She therefore has met the requirements of language use: she has an idea in her head which she has successfully communicated to an audience. There is nothing ignorant about this language use.

Now, she may not know that “literally” has another meaning (although I’m skeptical of that, I’ll grant that). So what? I didn’t know until just now (Googling for a few minutes to find a word with an unusual secondary definition) that “anodyne” not only means “bland,” but also means “drug that allays pain.” If I called a performance anodyne, using the “bland” meaning and successfully communicating to my audience, would you call me a moron for not knowing about a secondary meaning of the word?

Because that’s not how communication works, either. If a speaker successfully communicates the idea in her head using words, that’s successful language use. You may not find it stylish or pleasant, but the words to describe that are words like “tacky” or “anodyne,” not “ignorant” or “incorrect.”

142

My hypothesis here is that the word “literally” has a tendency to sound like an intensifier when used correctly (by which I simply mean “in accordance with its original meaning”) – “when he ran into me it literally knocked the breath out of me”. This inspires the careless and ignorant to use it as a thoughtless adverb to add metaphorical impact: “When she told me that she would of went out with me if only I would of asked her, my head literally exploded.” Hence the “moron” designation which, while perhaps hyperbolic, I think is justified.

And, not to belabor a point that has already been raised by myself and others, but I think it’s an important one: the world “literal” is really a special case and I strongly disagree with posters like Riemann who consider it a simple case of metaphorical usage which explicitly acknowledges that it’s being used in the exact opposite sense of its intended meaning. It’s ridiculous. The word’s role in the English lexicon is explicitly to distinguish metaphor from literal fact – along with its variants like literalism, phrases like “to take literally”, etc. To then use this explicit declaration of literalism as a meaningless figurative intensifier – and especially to do it out of unwitting ignorance rather than some clever wordplay – is entirely different from all other figurative usage. It deprecates a valuable word along with all of its associated variants and phraseology that are specifically intended to resolve ambiguity while adding nothing constructive or beneficial to the language.

Is it possible that I’m interpreting word meanings too literally? I mean, literally? Or am I just literally inflexible? Maybe I am – when I tried to get up just now my back ached. Literally.

143

Nice hypothesis. How did you test it? Or are you unclear as to the purpose of hypotheses?

You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

For something to be “explicit,” it must not be “implicit.” Is “implicit” the word you were reaching for? Maybe one of those usages is correct, but the other two are clearly not.

In any case, I believe you are misreading the phrase “metaphorical intensifier.” Riemann can of course elaborate, but the likeliest and most straightforward meaning is “a word used to intensify a metaphor.” It’s not an intensifier used in a metaphorical fashion.

144

Yikes. Sorry for the missing quote tag above. That’s the sort of dumb mistake that messes with communication for real.

145

forreals?

146

I have never come across an instance where there is any confusion whether “literally” is being used metaphorically as an intensifier or in its literal sense. And “literally” isn’t used to mean its opposite. It is used to mean “literally,” but in a hyperbolic/figurative sense. Saying you could “figuratively” eat a horse kind of deflates the whole absurd metaphor by pointing it out. Yes, by now it’s trite and overused, but I don’t understand why so many smart people seem to claim they can’t figure out when “literally” is being used in one sense and not the other.

147

This is a wondrously strange new Left Hand of Dorkness we haven’t seen before. Have we entered Bizarro World? The Twilight Zone? What has become of the self-described descriptivist who is incredibly permissive about all manner of language use because all that matters is that we understand what the person meant? The one who just informed us that “If a speaker successfully communicates the idea in her head using words, that’s successful language use.”? The one who ridiculed the idea of words having “real meaning”?

So I presume this is supposed to be some kind of snark. Too bad you’re doing it wrong. Just like you did over here where you demonstrated that you were unclear what the word “shrill” means.

Here, expand your vocabulary at vocabulary.com:
In science, a hypothesis is an idea or explanation that you then test through study and experimentation. Outside science, a theory or guess can also be called a hypothesis.

A hypothesis is something more than a wild guess but less than a well-established theory. In science, a hypothesis needs to go through a lot of testing before it gets labeled a theory. In the non-scientific world, the word is used a lot more loosely. A detective might have a hypothesis about a crime, and a mother might have a hypothesis about who spilled juice on the rug. Anyone who uses the word hypothesis is making a guess.

(I’ve restored the missing quote tag.)

No, the word I was reaching for, and grasped, was “explicit”. My statement that Riemann explicitly acknowledged the word’s use in a metaphorical sense was based on his use of the word “metaphorical” to describe it! That’s pretty damned explicit.

And the established, non-controversial definition of “literal” is pretty damned explicit about the fact that the word is used to denote actual literal fact and thus distinguish it from metaphor.

Really? Riemann is going to have an uphill battle with that one, because his statement referred to “literally” being “…used as a metaphorical intensifier, analogous with * incredibly*”. You will note that when I say something is “incredibly big”, it is the intensifier itself that is the metaphor, not the thing it is intensifying.

148

No, I think from the context it’s clear that wolfpup is aware of the difference between explicit and implicit and is using the correct one.

149

Small correction – in the above, I meant to say
And the established, non-controversial definition of “literally” …
not “literal”.

150

Prior to reading this thread the past few days, I would have counted myself among those who become strongly irritated at the use of “literally” as an intensifier. Now, however, after considering the various arguments that have been posted, I believe that I will have a more flexible view on its usage. Some of these arguments assign a rigidity to its use that borders on the absurd.

I note that there is a new thread on the use of qualifiers with “unique.” I have a feeling that this thread will head down a like path, and I’m guessing the resulting takeaway, for me, will be similar.

151

Left Hand of Dorkness was correct - when I originally used the ambiguous phrase “metaphorical intensifier” I meant an intensifier of metaphors. I laid out explicitly what I think is happening in the usage in post #112.

However, I do think the other reading works too. I think this use of literally can indeed be described as an “an intensifier that is a word used metaphorically”, analogous to incredibly.

But wolfpup and perhaps others still seem to insist that this analysis as a metaphorical usage somehow imbues an opposite meaning. That seems rather obviously wrong to me, but I must admit that I it has taken some careful thought about how I can articulate that clearly. Let me try:

(a) Your story is believable.
(b) Your story is so convoluted that it’s almost incredible.
(c) Your oufit is incredible! [metaphorical usage]

(a) and (b) are antonyms; but the metaphorical usage (c) is in a different category, it represents a more complex compound concept used for figurative purposes. We could describe the meaning as “pretend incredible”. By “pretend” I mean simply the device of a metaphor, where a superficial lie is understood by both speaker and listener to be untrue, and where the comparison of a simile is implicit.

So clearly (a) and (c) are NOT synonyms - “not incredible” and “pretend incredible” are quite distinct concepts.

Now the tricky one:

(a) She’s not really glowing, I meant it metaphorically!
(b) He took her words literally.
(c) That’s literally the worst thing ever! [metaphorical usage]

The analysis is the same. (a) and (b) are antonyms, but (c) is in a different category. Note that using a word metaphorically does not make it mean “metaphorical”, even if that word happens to be “literal”! Again, (c) represents a more complex compound concept in a different category.

And clearly (a) and (c) are not synonyms. (a) means “not literally”, while (c) means “pretend literally”, quite distinct concepts.

152

Bringing together my earlier post #112 and the one above #151, I think the use of the word “pretend” in the analysis as a marker for metaphors may be quite helpful. “Pretend” here is just a marker for the obvious understanding between speaker and listener that the statement is not true, it’s a rhetorical device where the comparison of a simile is implicit.

It was as though she was glowing.
A simile, with an explicit comparison.

She [pretend] glowed.
A metaphor.

She [pretend] literally [pretend] glowed.
Doubling down on the metaphor.

153

Riemann, that’s an excellent analysis–thanks.

154

Setting aside whether we like or dislike the usage, one thing that I think we can all agree on is that the conscious deliberative analysis of precisely what’s going on when we use literally in this way has proved surprisingly challenging and confusing. And yet** every English speaker knows intuitively how to use the expression and understands what it means**.

It’s a great example of how we all intuitively know the vast majority of the rules of language unconsciously, even though we can’t articulate them. It’s what Steven Pinker was discussing in the excerpt that I posted earlier. I’ll post the key part again, and I’d urge people to buy the whole book, it’s a really entertaining read.

[QUOTE=Steven Pinker in “The Language Instinct” Chapter 12]

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 only in the “correct” way]…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…
[/QUOTE]

The message is, we do not learn language from our schoolteachers. This case of the use of literally makes that abundantly clear. Nobody taught us how to use it, but we all know how.

We learn oral language as children by spontaneous absorption of how other people around us speak. And it’s obviously not just rote copying - anyone with a kid knows that young children are constantly trying (unconsciously, they can’t articulate it) to work out the general rules for how to build sentences. We know that they are seeking general rules because of the kind of mistakes they make when there’s an irregular construction, or when they just don’t yet have enough correct examples to infer the general rule correctly. As parents, how do we help them along? Well, for sure it’s not usually by telling them “the rule is…” because most parents themselves can’t articulate the rules accurately. What we usually do is to state the irregular construction in a sentence, or give the kid a bunch more relevant examples of correct sentences, and then we see the kid’s mind working as it (again, I’ll emphasize unconsciously) updates the impied rule based on the new information.

Thus, even the most illiterate peasant and the greatest literary genius share 99% of these fundamental rules of how to build and understand coherent oral sentences. But, as with most things, we take for granted skills that everyone has. Prescriptivist peevers then obsess about the trivialities of the other 1% of the rules, building self-important fantasies that unless the erudite (i.e. people who agree with their pseudoscientific justification of their opinions) standardize that 1% and impose these externally-derived standards on others, that none of us will be able to communicate clearly and civilization will fall apart.

155

My three-year-old has a hell of a time with gender pronouns. Used to be everyone was “she.” Now she realize thats “he” and “his” exist, but she seems to have some sort of rule that puts “she” in the nominative and “his” in the possessive, so she’ll say things like, “Joe was here, and she put his lunch in the refrigerator.”

I’m sure not trying to teach her correct placement of pronouns by explaining the nominative and possessive case to her. Instead, I often repeat things back: “Oh, he put his lunch in the refrigerator?” and she says, “Yeah.” I know she’ll get his pronouns straight eventually.

156

Actually no, it’s more like a great example of how the claim of innate language skills is both correct and, in this context, irrelevant.

Yes, I agree that we have innate and unconscious language skills that can be considered quite sophisticated by certain measures. It’s even been attributed to a specific gene (FOXP2) present only in humans. And it’s quite difficult to build computational models of how we process language. All of this is true.

But by other measures – like the context of the present argument – these are primitive skills that don’t help at all. That’s why we disagree on these very points, and it’s not because one of us is deficient in the language gene or is less intelligent than the other. We have preferences, styles, customs, different peer group influences, and God help us, we might even have some kind of ideal for what constitutes good language. At this level the innate-skills argument is completely irrelevant, even though it’s an important general point in other contexts. It’s a lot like saying how dare someone criticize a ballet dancer or an athlete, since we all have the intrinsic ability to control our limbs and we all know how to do it.

I was wondering how you’d backpedal on that, in view of the following statement I made previously:
Riemann is going to have an uphill battle with that one, because his statement referred to “literally” being “…used as a metaphorical intensifier, analogous with incredibly”. You will note that when I say something is “incredibly big”, it is the intensifier itself that is the metaphor, not the thing it is intensifying.
I see that you chose to do it by claiming that both interpretations are correct. In which case, Left Hand of Dorkness is just as wrong as (s)he is right, but don’t let that stand in the way of my opponents banding together in agreeable solidarity. :wink:

But with regard to your attempts to show that the metaphorical usage is not a direct opposite, respectfully, you’ve failed to do so. In my view all you’ve done is expended considerable labors to explain what a metaphor is. But we all know what a metaphor is. The problem is that we have a special word in the language that explicitly means “what follows is not a metaphor, it is to be taken literally” and this word has been appropriated for use as a pointless intensifier for metaphors and as a metaphor itself.

The point that some of us are making is that among the many different mutations that the English language is constantly undergoing, this is an example of a counterproductive and undesirable one. No more and no less a point than that. It’s not that we can do much about it at this stage of devolution. Although it might be noted that no less an authority than the OED has stated that they incorporated the contradictory meaning of “literally” (back in 2010 or thereabouts, I believe) not because they think it’s right, but because their role is to be the documenting agent of usage and not the arbiter of it. They are, as you might triumphantly proclaim, acting as strict descriptivists. That’s their job, because that’s what dictionaries are for. But by defending their inclusion of the new definition this way – and indeed by deferring it as long as they did – they also seem to imply that the usage is undesirable or – dare I say it again – stupid.

157

If that’s all you said, it’d be merely a matter of style, and de gustibus. But y’all’ve called the intensifier meaning incorrect, and y’all’ve called its users ignorant and morons, and y’all’ve come up with absurd “hypotheses” to explain why people would use the word, in order to avoid the simplest and most likely explanation, viz., folks use it to communicate an idea they want to communicate, and they expect their audience to understand that idea thereby.

But if you want to prune your point of all that silliness and limit yourself henceforth to an argument according to preference and style, I applaud that.

158

Funnily enough at the start of this discussion I too personally disliked the use of literally this way, as a stylistic matter, although I can’t say I really had strong feelings about it.

My bone of contention (as always with prescriptivisits) was the authoritarian and patronizing way in which they sought pseudoscientific objective justification for their stylistic opinions, condemning anyone who disagreed as stupid or ignorant (in so many words), and holding themselves up as the noble guardians of our ability to talk to one another without vanishing into a black hole of ambiguity and confusion.

Ironically, after analyzing what’s seems to be going on with the usage I have now come to like it stylistically. I like viewing it as doubling down on the metaphor, and taking away the “safe word” that we used to have for dangerous metaphors that make us uncomfortable. It will increase in frequency in my personal corpus.

159

By the same token, if you saw a ballet in which the dancer made an awkward flailing move that looks like an accident, but insisted afterwards that it was deliberate, and pointed out that the same exact move had been carefully choreographed and performed by many famous dancers in the past, would you continue to insist that the dancer was ignorant and didn’t know “correct ballet,” or would you just say, “Well then I don’t like that dance”?

160

I don’t remember (and can’t be bothered to scroll up to check) who complained about someone using it as a generic intensifier, but I find it hilarious and am going to do that from now on. I am literally going to do that. The looks I get will make me literally happy. So happy I might literally wet myself. Figuratively, that is. Literally figuratively.