the s.d.m.b.
Ding ding ding, we have a winner! That’s what irritates the shit out of me. “Literally” does not mean “figuratively” ever. It may be used in a figurative manner as hyperbole or a general intensifier, but it does not literally mean “figuratively.”
“I’m so hungry I could figuratively eat a horse” sounds idiotic to my ears. Like you say, it’s like saying “I’m so hungry I could, if I were to exaggerate for the sake of emphasizing my point, eat a horse.” “I’m so hungry I can literally eat a horse” sounds fine. It’s a hyperbolic intensifier, everybody knows exactly what it fucking means, just leave the language alone.
Grr…these "literally means ‘figuratively’ " people make me angry.
[quote]
We do? The first vowel is different in my dialect.[\quote]
I don’t know about all Americans, but most make a difference in the length of the first vowel (the one in “rider” is longer). What is surprising about this is that vowel length is not normally a phonemic distinction in English, as it is, say, in German (compare Stadt and Staat). But in this pair of words and at least one other (ladder and latter) it is significant. And I have tested this, not in a context, but just a single word pair, in many a speaker of American English and they all readily hear those particular distinctions. I believe this is well known to phoneticians.
And I suspect that if you hear homogenius (or think you do) it is because, but not the speaker are pronouncing homogeneous with stress on the second syllable, which may (I’m too lazy to check) may also be an acceptable pronunciation. Otherwise I can’t imagine how you could tell.
Yes, but it seems that Merriam-Webster disagrees. They didn’t define “literally” as an intensifier. They said it just meant “almost literally.”
And, while figuratively does not just mean that, it does in fact include hyperbole. The definition of literally now, for some stupid reason, includes its figurative use.
Note the use of another word meaning the same thing as “literally” that has not been co-opted as an intensifier. “Actually” is another. It’s not some end to our language. It’s just weird defining something by its use in figurative language. And even weirder not first putting it in as informal–as I do not know anyone who uses “literally” in a figurative way that does not also believe they are being informal.
While I agree that using “figuratively” to replace “literally” would not mean the same thing, I disagree that the sentence is all that weird. It’s no weirder than saying something like “putting the proverbial cart before the horse.” Sometimes you do actually need to specify that you are using figurative language.
From TBBT:
Leonard: Uh, we’re on our way to the comic book store.
Howard: Leonard’s buying.
Zack: Really? I haven’t been to a comic book store in literally a million years.
Sheldon: Literally? Literally a million years?
Leonard: Don’t.
Joe Biden wins again.
Perhaps this means that “literally” will fall into the same class of words that contains the verbs “sanction” and “seed”: words that mean the opposite of what they mean. There is a name for those kind of words, but all I can remember is that I think it ends in “-nym”.
Nobody has ever spontaneously expressed the phrase that their head “figuratively exploded”…
I guess you could say that the new definition is literally bullshit.
Shouldn’t that be the “apostrolypse”? Just sayin!
On edit: Ninja’d by DougK!
To me it sounds dumb because I have never ever heard anyone use that construction. The “proverbial” construction I have heard. I have heard someone clarify something by saying “figuratively speaking” at the end. But I’ve never encountered someone dropping “figuratively” in a sentence that would normally be serviced by an emphatic/hyperbolic use of the word “literally.” It defeats the whole point of using “literally.”
Yeah, same here. A better example might be “petal” and “pedal,” which really are, so far as I can tell, exactly the same in my dialect.
I think examples where someone’s usage of the word could now be ambiguous are fairly easy to come up with. Here’s a quick one off the top of my head (and most certainly NOT LITERALLY!)
If I’m on a neighborhood basketball team and I say we lost the game because our opponents had players who were “literally 7 feet tall,” before this stupid definition change, most educated English speaking people would think that someone saying that means that the players actually stood 7 feet tall. Now, with this change of definition, “literally” in effect has no meaning at all; I’m 6-2, and my audience should now be confused as to whether my opponents were 7 feet tall or “only” 6-5!
Have you ever in your life heard someone come up with one? Because that’s what I specified: someone in real life using the word in a confusing manner. It’s trivial to think of examples where it’s confusing, but I can also think of examples in which the word “run” is used in a confusing manner.
Contranyms or auto-antonyms.
I think I just did with the basketball example. Also, if someone says they literally laughed so hard they cried. If we use the word properly (as in the way it was originally defined) then literally in these instances lets us know that the person really teared up from laughing hard, or actually played against a 7-footer; now, we just don’t know.
As far as “run” is concerned, please tell me what you’re talking about.
Nothing has changed. It’s been used this way for a long time, only finally the editors of dictionaries are getting their sticks out their asses and recognizing it, as they should have been (and, as has been noted, the prestigious OED has for awhile.)
As for the example, my assumption would be that the players are actually 7 feet tall or pretty damned close to it if I heard “literally” used in that manner, as literally is pretty much always, in my experience in the wild, used in a hyperbolic manner. So, “those players are, like, literally 12 feet tall!” That’s a figurative, hyperbolic use of “literally.” “Those players are literally 7 feet tall” – by the estimation of the observer, the players are, in fact, 7 feet tall or close enough.
It astounds me that in conversation, people every day use these sorts of idiomatic expressions and understand each other just fine, yet supposedly intelligent language maven types insist that one cannot use the word “literally” in a figurative manner because all meaning and logic will fall apart, it is confusing and ambiguous, and this is somehow another sign of the decline of the English language. I even have a degree in English, and it puzzles me that an idiom so easy to understand seems to flummox and ire my fellow English majors, who should damned well be accustomed to idiom and figurative language.
We aren’t talking about YouTube commentators, it’s writers like Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, and Mark Twain:
I don’t like it any more than anybody else; in fact it grates on me. But we have examples of its use that way dating back to the 19th century, and by respected writers, to satisfy the “usage makes it correct” argument, and we have the Merriam-Webster dictionary for the “Dictionary makes it correct” argument.
All that’s left is the “that sucks, it makes the word (literally) useless” argument, which I heartily agree with, but I have to admit it’s a lost cause.
Do you literally have a degree in English? If so, and you’re fine with using words incorrectly, then bravo. Here’s another example. “I got in a fight with this guy who had a black belt in karate, literally.” If literally means he actually earned a black belt, the story has a bit more meaning then if I was just hyping up some guy who could throw a pretty decent kick. If you can’t see how the different usages of this word make it a much less useful word, then I’m wasting my time arguing–literally.