And that’s one of the great things about language. We have filler words. We have words that are intensifiers. We have words that are ambiguous with a multitude of meanings. I don’t want to get all kumbaya here, but one of the things I love about language is that there is not necessarily a one-to-one correspondence between words and meaning. That’s where the beauty is. I’m not going to vociferously defend “literally” specifically as part of this beauty, but ambiguity or non-meaning are not, to me, things to be eradicated in language.
This is generally where pedants end up: petulance. Thanks for the permission to keep using language to communicate though.
Nobody is saying people have to start including the word figuratively in general conversation. As noted, you can usually tell the meaning by context.
But there are times when you want to express the concept that you are not speaking figuratively even though the statement you’re making would normally be regarded as such.
I worked in a prison. When I said “It was murder at work today” I normally meant it in a figurative sense and was implying everyone was very busy. But when I said “It was literally murder at work today” I meant somebody was killed (although, ironically, the result of that was also everyone being very busy).
It seems to me that the ambiguity is often addressed with a one-syllable qualifier: no one ever says “… quite literally …” unless they are really using the literal meaning of literally.
It’s not language–it’s a waste of a word. This is not pedantry. With the word having two meanings, it adds zero to any sentence. Please give an example of where it has value. And I’d like to add that name calling is an impressive addition to your argument. Oooh, he called me a pedant.
Reading this thread is (literally!) giving me flashbacks to one day in second-grade math class, when we had to solve math problems that were embedded in a detective story. One of the problems could only be solved if you knew how many keys were available to unlock a certain number of doors. Which should have been straightforward enough:
But I argued that there was no way to solve the problem, because Robbie never said that there were twenty keys - only that there must be. No human person, I insisted, would say “there must be [round number] items!” to convey “I know for a fact that there are exactly [round number] items, no more, no less!”. My teacher disagreed.
This is true to my experience. I was hesitant to mention it, because I have a feeling that’s going to open up yet a-whole-nother can of grammatical worms.
Language is not about efficiency. You don’t get “bonus points” for conveying a thought in the least amount of words.
I think this will be crucial for the development of AIs with some level of emotional competence since the idea that body language and tone can completely upend and contradict whatever is coming out of your mouth.
Just take how the word ‘fine’ is often used to mean precisely the opposite. If something is bothering your SO and and that person responses to your concern with ‘fine,’ odds are that things are not only not fine, but that you are in some very deep shit.
How do people misuse “penultimate”?
They use it to mean some like the emphatic form of “ultimate” or “archetypical” or “quintessential.” I wish I could say I’ve only heard it a couple of times in speaking, but it’s not so. In the documentary Hype, about the grunge scene, for example, the photographer Charles Peterson refers to one of his photos of Kurt Cobain as his “penultimate grunge photo,” when it’s clear he doesn’t mean “next to last” but something like “the ultimate ultimate.” It is not anywhere near the only time I have heard it used that way, but that’s the one that immediately comes to mind, as it’s the first it’s pinged my radar and, since then, I’ve heard it used similarly quite often. (“Often” being relative, as “penultimate” is not a common word, but in the sense that when I hear “penultimate” being used, about 1 out of 3 times it is not used to mean “next to last.”)
Wow, do you seriously think you’re not being a pedant here? That’s kind of astonishing.
It’s not a waste of a word, and the meaning is perfectly clear in virtually every sentence.
Consider two sentences:
- There are literally no intelligent people in Congress right now.
Given that sentence, you know that I mean I believe the number of intelligent people in Congress is zero. You can argue with that (I would), but the meaning is clear.
- When I found out that the government shutdown would mean that Head Start programs would be suspended, I literally blew a gasket.
Given that sentence, you know that I meant the idiomatic meaning of “blew a gasket,” that is, I felt extremely upset, and “literally” means that I was extra, extra upset.
In both cases, the word modifies the meaning of the sentence. There’s no confusion about what it means.
“Literally” used as an intensifier is in my experience always used in cases in which it’s intensifying hyperbole or idiom. “Literally” used as the antonym to “figuratively” is always used in cases in which the listener could think the expression was an estimate or a very slight exaggeration.
I’ve literally never seen any real-world confusion over these two distinct meanings. (By which of course I mean that you might think I’m slightly exaggerating, that I’ve seen it once or twice, and I want to clarify that the number of times I’ve seen it really is, without exaggeration, zero–but of course you knew that’s what I meant).
Actually, I found a nice little article on about.com (of all places) that discusses this.
Merriam-Webster: Descriptive, not proscriptive.
:o
As any dictionary, IMHO, should be. Leave the proscription to the style guides.
Why is literally singled out among all the words that theoretically denote truth but are just as often used as a generic intensifier? They don’t have “figuratively” as a use for seriously, actually, or really on their online dictionary.
The same ambiguities can happen with those words too, if someone else isn’t sure if someone else is BSing (or they’re calling out the BS).
Bob: Those guys were seriously seven feet tall!
Alice: Really?
Bob: Well…
What are other words with dueling definitions or descriptive uses that flip the original?
Infer
Peruse
Bemuse
Anxious
Eye of the storm
Inflammable
Under par
Or you can go old school. Awful, terrific, terrible, awesome, etc.
Literally or figuratively?
If the former, how much do they charge? I want my definitions with happy endings.
For now perhaps. But the same linguistic laziness that ruined literally could move on to that as well.
To use Left Hand’s example, people used to say “When I found out that the government shutdown would mean that Head Start programs would be suspended, I blew a gasket.” But eventually that idiom lost its oomph, so they started throwing in another word to pep it up without regard for the actual meaning of the word they were using: “When I found out that the government shutdown would mean that Head Start programs would be suspended, I literally blew a gasket.” As we’re seeing, they’ve now abused literally to the point where it’s lost its meaning. So now they’ll have to start saying “When I found out that the government shutdown would mean that Head Start programs would be suspended, I quite literally blew a gasket.”
What’s basically happening is that people are overreaching their vocabularies. They’re trying to use big words when they don’t really know what they mean. And every time they cram a word into a sentence where it doesn’t fit and figure the context will convey their meaning, they weaken the word’s actual meaning. Eventually we’ll all end up just making random noises to call attention to ourselves and then conveying our actual meaning by facial expressions. We’ll have devolved ourselves back down to the linguistic level of the chimpanzees.
I’d be willing to bet that most people, if stopped and asked, do know what “literally” literally means. Like me, they just don’t care and use idiomatic usage. Just like when I say “I could care less” when I couldn’t care less.
I think that argument has been made pretty much every generation, yet our language is strong, flexible, and more colorful for the linguistic variation (IMHO). English ain’t going anywhere.