Fo’ shizzle. No one should ever need to ask a clarifying ”Was that a hyperbolic ‘literally,’ or a really and truly ‘literally?’”
It was literally literal.
That would clarify things.
I literally hate her music, but I’m a fan of Rick Beato who posted this on the very next day.
Now isn’t it ironic…
Moved to MPSIMS.
shrug
Dictionaries catalog the use of language, they don’t dictate it.
The abandonment of mutually agreed upon definitions of words is the first step on the journey to Babel.
I’m so confused. Really odd, like, it’s not even numbers? How does that make any sense? And if that’s not what you mean, why did you say “really,” as in, “characterizing reality”?
Are you flouting convention or flaunting it?
Forgive the full-fledged rant, but I’ve been wanting to make a few comments about McWhorter’s claims, and I did make a few up in that earlier post, but you’ve given me an excuse to get a few others off my chest. But I’ll respond to your own comments first.
I think you’d find that we’re generally in agreement on many matters of excessive prescriptivism, so it’s unfortunate that you’re trying to defend the egregiously bad practice that has cast an important word like “literally” into the linguistic murk of being a confusing contronym. It’s interesting that your analogies here fail – playfully snarky though they may be – for exactly the same reason that McWhorter’s serious arguments fail: the words that he alleges are contronyms are in actual fact mostly words with historically closely related meanings, and any sense of meaning opposite things is entirely contrived.
To cite your own examples, the long-established basic meaning of “odd” per the Oxford Dictionary is “different to what is usual or expected; strange”, so it would naturally evolve to related meanings like “a person or thing differing from all other members of a particular group or set in some way” and thence to the concept of odd numbers. These are all related concepts, and it’s no surprise to anyone that many words have multiple meanings that usually have a common etymology. It’s the same with “really”, whose basic meaning (“in actual fact, as opposed to what is said or imagined to be true or possible”) naturally lends itself to its use as an intensifier whose meaning is perfectly consistent.
I said you were making the same mistake McWhorter did, and I’ll give you a good example. In trying to justify the abuse of “literally”, he gets hung up on the word “fast” as a supposedly equivalent contronym, claiming that while it denotes speed, it also has the connotation of something being entirely immovable, as in “held fast” or “stuck fast”. This analogy is just total nonsense. This is the etymology of “fast”:
Old English fæst ‘firmly fixed, steadfast’ and fæste ‘firmly’, of Germanic origin; related to Dutch vast and German fest ‘firm, solid’ and fast ‘almost’. In Middle English the adverb developed the senses ‘strongly, vigorously’ (compare with run hard), and ‘close, immediate’ (just surviving in the archaic fast by; compare with hard by, both meaning “very near”), hence ‘closely, immediately’ and ‘quickly’; the idea of rapid movement was then reflected in adjectival use.
– from the Oxford Dictionary of English, Oxford University Press
One can see the logical evolution and the relationships among the different meanings. No one disputes that words have multiple meanings. The particular abomination with “literally” that you and McWhorter are trying to defend, however, is equivalent to “really” devolving into sometimes meaning “not really”, and coming into common use as sometimes meaning “entirely fabricated or imaginary”. I’m sure McWhorter would applaud that as a marvelous affirmation of the wondrous expressiveness of the English language and the innate proficiency of its speakers. Many of us would disagree. The reason it hasn’t happened is probably because, unlike “literally”, there’s no pathway that would create such a meaning through slipshod mistakes, as there is with other solecisms that insinuate themselves into the language.
It’s the same with his other examples. Most so-called contronyms in English are words that might be alleged to have somewhat opposing meanings in certain contexts, but closer examination usually reveals these to be rather contrived superficial arguments because either those words are not direct opposites and merely share a common root, or else they denote something so commonplace and unambiguous that the usual negating prefix has been omitted (when a cook says she is going to “bone” a chicken instead of “debone”, few would be under the impression that she is engaged in the veterinary activity of crafting a skeleton for a boneless chicken – a hypothetical that doesn’t even have a verb to describe it. So again, this is in a different realm entirely from the fiasco of “literally”.
A lot of these alleged contronyms are so contrived that it’s almost like a linguistic game. Hey, the word “seized” can mean that authorities take certain goods away from you, yet when the brake caliper on your car is “seized”, you can’t make it go away! They mean opposite things, just like “literally”! No, they don’t. It’s just a word that means several different conceptually related things due to a common etymology.
My final observation here is that when words really do become genuine contronyms, it’s deleterious to the language because in principle it can and sometimes does create ambiguity. You’ve claimed in the past that in no case in history has the figurative use of “literally” ever caused confusion, but as noted in my earlier post, McWhorter’s own example of Thomas Otway being said to have “literally died from hunger” is, with all respect to the unfortunate Mr. Otway, a beautiful example of a thoroughly ambiguous statement.
I like to be randomly allusive, elusive, or illusive. But sometimes it’s hard to tell if I evoke these traits or merely invoke them.
Dictionaries are descriptivist. They document the way people use a word - even when a lot of people are using it incorrectly.
To combine grain is the opposite of to combine it, depending on which syllable you stress.
She could also be pulling an Ernie Anastos 
“really” is precisely equivalent to “literally” in its dual meanings. Compare these two sets of sentences:
1a) Yes, I really did steam the asparagus.
1b) Yes, I really was steamed at his effrontery.
2a) Yes, I literally steamed the asparagus.
2b) Yes, I was literally steamed at his effrontery.
In both (b) cases, the adverb is used as an intensifier. “Literally” is no more used to mean “fabricated” than “really” is; rather, they’re both used in a hyperbolic sense.
For some reason, mavens really get steamed about “literally,” but are literally stonefaced about “really.”
I will die on the hill of correctly using “alternative” instead of “alternate”.
To alternate is to oscillate back and forth.
An alternative is the other option.
“Alternate” is pronounced differently from “alternate”, and there are numerous similar examples in the language. When the last syllable is a long-a sound, it is a verb; when it is a schwa sound, it is a noun. One that comes to mind is “precipitate”.
On the other hand, “plate” is always pronounced with a long-a sound whether noun or verb.
That’s not my point. The meaning of the word is already established as pertaining to “alternative”. There is no need for another, almost exactly similar word, one which already has a completely different definition. You’re needlessly complicating matters by using the wrong word from the ones available.
Your (a) items have quite different meanings from each other, and your (b) items do too. Was that intentional? I don’t quite get what you’re doing.
1a) “I’m not lying, it’s cooked”
1b) “I was angry”
2a) “I didn’t secretly use a different cooking method”
2b) “Heated water vapor was rising from my body”
Note that in 2b there is no emphasis gained by using the word “literally”. The only plausible reason for it to be there is that it means “literally literally”.
The use of intensifiers is often a sign that a person doesn’t have a good vocabulary. They want to express a thought but they don’t know the words to use. So they throw in intensifiers. And the words they use as intensifiers often have no relation to their actual meaning. They’re just using some random multi-syllabled word that they overheard but don’t understand. A person saying “I would literally kill for a pizza” might as well be saying “I would economically kill for a pizza” or “I would collectively kill for a pizza” or “I would zoologically kill for a pizza”. They’re just demonstrating that all words with more than three syllables have no meaning to them so they use them all interchangeably. They are debasing the language with their ignorance.
If you don’t know what a word means, don’t use it. Stick with the words you know. If you find you can’t communicate with those words, then just point at what you want and grunt. If you want to intensify your message, grunt louder. Leave language to those of us who know how to use it.
You’re being dismissive of a very important distinction here. When “really” is used as an adverb, it can have several closely related meanings clearly stemming from the core concept of reality as in the definition I cited earlier: “in actual fact, as opposed to what is said or imagined to be true or possible”. One meaning denotes literal veracity, much like “literally”. By extension, it can also function as a legitimate intensifier: “it really hurts” affirms that one isn’t just saying or pretending that it hurts, and it carries the same intensifying quality as might the appended adverbial phrase “very much”.
This starts to provide some insight into why (1b) is indisputably standard grammatical usage and (2b) is poor form, accepted only by dint of many years of laziness and imprecision. It’s not complicated. In (1b) and (2b) “steamed” is a metaphor. “Really” makes perfect sense in intensifying a metaphor for the reason I just stated, but the fundamental original purpose of “literally” was to distinguish metaphors from literal truths.
This is a really, really (as in “very, very”) important distinction.
One argument that’s sometimes brought up is that some great writers appear to have used “literally” in senses that approach the figurative or are downright metaphorical. I love good writing and no one appreciates it more than I do when a lyrical turn of phrase soars with expressive beauty, whether in poetry or prose. Such language in the hands of a master craftsman transcends the conventions of style and the mundane dictums of ordinary grammar. But what we are concerned with here is not the great writer but the ordinary one. We are concerned, to quote the English writer Ben Masters in an interesting article I want to mention that I recently came across, with lazy and imprecise users of language. Great writers bend the rules of grammar to achieve extraordinary expressiveness; bad writers just mangle the language out of ignorance and make themselves hard to understand.
The article quotes former English footballer and current sports columnist Jamie Redknapp cheerfully driving the use of “literally” to unintended heights of comedy: “Barca literally passed Arsenal to death”; “he had to cut back inside on to his left, because he literally hasn’t got a right foot”.
But then Masters observes the careful and insightful prose of James Joyce, Salman Rushdie, and Saul Bellow in which the word “literally” is nudged into figurative territory (Joyce: “Lily, the caretaker’s daughter, was literally run off her feet”; Rushdie: “he began, literally, to fade”). He goes on:
The point is that these writers are actually being highly precise in their misuses. Here is a particular favourite of mine:
[INDENT]“The earth is literally a mirror of thoughts. Objects themselves are embodied thoughts. Death is the dark backing that a mirror needs if we are to see anything.”
This is the sublime Saul Bellow in Humboldt’s Gift. The thoughts are partially ironised – they belong to the novel’s narrator, who is struggling to summarise a range of impenetrable philosophical works – but nevertheless contain immense truth and beauty. However, it is by working through and beyond that initial intervening “literally” that he gets to the pure metaphor of the last sentence. And it is in that last sentence that we hit the heights of genius.[/INDENT]
Masters draws a worthy distinction, I think, between the comical solepsisms of lazy and imprecise users of language (“my head literally exploded”) and brilliant writers like Joyce, Rushdie, and Bellow whose carefully honed craft beautifully illuminates our world:
… The writers, however, are the ones who recognise our powerful need for the literal and figurative. They convey our longing for some kind of sympathy between the figurative expressions of our imaginations (clumsy and beautiful as they are) and the empirical truth of the literal world that we seek to describe. The writers show us that if the world is a mirror of thoughts, no straightforwardly literal statement will ever be enough to help us see it more clearly.
- The Ben Masters who wrote that article is not Ben Masters the American actor; he is a young English writer currently doing his PhD in English at Cambridge.