“The clear effort of President Trump and Prime Minister Netanyahu to turn Israel literally into a local branch of the Republican Party…is a harmful and serious trend.” - Itzmik Shmuli, Labor politician
Nope, Netanyahu may see his country as a figurative auxiliary of the G.O.P., but there’s nothing literal about it.
“There are going to be some issues where the (New Hampshire) Legislature and the governor differ, but there are others where I’m literally scratching my head,” said Donna Soucy, the Democratic Senate president."
If you’re literally scratching your head, Donna, better have someone check your scalp for ectoparasites.
You’re either quoting a man who speaks English as a second language, or you’re quoting a translation of unknown quality. Can I have a source? Was it an interview with WSJ? Because I can’t find the quote on Shmuli’s Twitter or Facebook accounts.
Both of those things might easily be intended literally as well as figuratively. It’s not like they’re saying something like “literally climbing the walls.”
Another term whose usage has been co-opted by the Ignorati is “exponential growth.” One of the following two sequences exhibits exponential growth in its mathematical sense. Guess which one.
1, 8, 27, 64, 125, 216, 343, 512, 729, 1000, 1331, 1728,
2.000, 2.020, 2.040, 2.060, 2.081, 2.102, 2.123, 2.144, 2.165, 2.187, 2.209, 2.231,
But faulty facts are even worse than Humpty-Dumpty words. On a somberer note even prestigious newspapers are rife with factual confusions. The “Age of Information” indeed!
Meanwhile the dictionary definition of the word “literally” literally includes its hyperbolic and metaphoric usages. OED inclusive. Such usage dates back to at least 1789 and with the likes of Dickens, F Scott Fitzgerald, James Joyce, and Bronte using it in that sense.
Like many words its meaning is determined by the context.
The author of that article is straining hard (figuratively?) to justify bad usage, both by claiming people have been screwing up that way for a long time (no surprise there) and quoting at least one dictionary definition that doesn’t really support his argument (for example, the Collins English Dictionary, which supports use of ‘‘literally’’ as an '‘intensifier’, i.e. in saying ‘‘there were literally thousands of people’’).
If there were only a couple of dozen people, you can’t get away with saying there were ‘‘literally thousands’’, even if they were loud and obnoxious enough to simulate a much bigger crowd. :dubious:
The dictionaries that have caved to persistent human stupidity by essentially equating literal and figurative should figuratively be boiled in oil.
I’ll go with the comments from that article, Alex.
*"Definition 2: the dictionary is literally wrong.
This is literally the stupidest thing I’ve ever read.
I agree. “Literal” should never be used except when something truly, actually, is the case. i.e., “The farm explosion was so powerful that pigs were literally flying.”
Multiple dictionaries include that usage as a definition. Its usage in that manner has a long established history. Its usage in that manner is common usage by manner speakers and writers of the English language easily understood by pretty much everyone.
Descriptivists agree that ‘literally’ literally doesn’t mean ‘literally’ anymore. Words change meaning. Why aren’t ‘pretty awful’ and ‘awful pretty’ synonymous? How about Czar Ivan ‘the Terrible’ who is also called John ‘the Awesome’? I guess 450 years ago ‘terrible’ and ‘awesome’ were almost synonyms!
Words change, yes. But old fogeys like me don’t need to like it. Get off my lawn!
It annoys me, but the war is over and we lost. Usually I don’t care about stretching the language but in this case the people using “literally” to mean “figuratively” don’t know what “literally” literally means.
The purpose of a modern dictionary is to describe how people use a word. If people use the word “literally” to mean “figuratively,” then it is incumbent on them to list that definition. After all, what is the point of a dictionary if it doesn’t list every definition of a word?
You can put a note as to the (slowly dying) controversy over the usage, but if people use it that way, that has to be recorded.
You can’t stop linguistic change. I remember when people objected strenuously to starting a sentence with “Hopefully” (e.g., “Hopefully, he will not swim in shark-infested water”). I haven’t heard that little bete noir in years.
