You do realize, excuse me, realise, that we’re talking about English, right? 
Depends on the dialect; Spanish spelling is based on the dialects which used to be majoritary, so if you speak one of them it’s pretty easy but if you don’t it can get really hit-or-miss. Bad news: nowadays those dialects are minoritary, oops. I’ve had coworkers ask me “how do YOU pronounce [word]” because when I said it, they knew how to spell it. The dialectal issue sometimes leads to hypercorrections where someone decides that, since the usual spelling matches his pronunciation, it can’t be right… so they use a “corrected spelling” which is actually broken (“Pazcual” for Pascual).
And then there’s examples like that one, where the same sound can be represented by two different letters (both b and v correspond to the same sound as the English b), or our beloved enemy h, which is not pronounced and mostly serves to differentiate homophones.
This fills me with wist. My real last name is about as unusual as my Doper name.
I’ve been through this before. There are mavens on one side, and on the other side, we have Austen, Dickens, Nabokov, Joyce, Charlotte Bronte, Alexander Pope, and many others.
As for the question of ambiguity, on the one side we have mavens, and on the other we have a professional at MacMillan Dictionaries who examined 1,000 sample uses of “literally” and found that
I maintain that this isn’t a complaint about clarity of language, so much as it is a class marker, similar to making sure you’re wearing this season’s fashion. And drawing a distinction between “great thinkers” and “ordinary thinkers” makes it even clearer that this is a complaint about the lower classes, not a complaint about language itself.
English is hard.
Ismo: Ass Is The Most Complicated Word In The English Language | CONAN on TBS - YouTube“Alternative” and the noun “alternate” have subtly different meanings. I was on a jury some while ago, which had 12 jurors and 2 alternates: people who sat through the trial ready to step in if a juror was unable to make it into deliberation. In that usage, “alternative” is not a suitable alternative for “alternate”. Perhaps English is full of too much crufty subtlety and needs to be cleaned up. Or perhaps not.
Sure, and the Ben Masters article in the Guardian that I linked before provides an elegant and insightful account of how and why some great writers have used “literally” this way. In some instances they may be emphasizing a close similarity between the figurative and the literal (“there are degrees of literality; it is not binary”, says one of the respondents in your cited blog), and in others, they may be skillfully building a powerful metaphor, as the Guardian article so beautifully illustrates. In no case are they using the word out of ignorance of its proper meaning.
You’re rehashing an argument that’s already been well addressed. Your hypothetical “mavens” may object to such creatively skilled usage, but I don’t.
A few things should be noted here. Of the 1000 sample usages that this person examined, the vast majority were the proper, conventional use of the word. Only a relatively small number represented the disputed usage, a usage that your own cited defender gently derides as “it may be better to avoid this kind of thing”.
And if that individual failed to find any instances of ambiguity, his corpus apparently didn’t include the sentence from David Hume’s history of England which, as previously discussed, is completely ambiguous if one has to consider a possible figurative meaning of “literally”.
It’s about clarity of language. It’s easy to see how the misuse of “literally” was mostly due to picking up on its occasional use as a legitimate intensifier and then just mindlessly generalizing it. One might correctly say “I was so angry I was literally speechless” to emphasize the fact that this is no mere metaphor. This might lead the casual observer – one not given to a great deal of linguistic analysis – to mimic the pattern of “literally” as a generic intensifier in any arbitrary expression, including a purely metaphorical one. Like the use of profanity, we have a tendency to pepper our speech with redundant words, but the special pitfall of “literally” is its fundamental purpose in distinguishing between the literal and the figurative, so that its misuse is not just redundant and meaningless but directly counterfactual – an objectively bad practice that adds nothing to the language and actively undermines it.
Of course, in the hands of a really good writer who knows what he’s doing, an unusual or unconventional usage can be used to great expressive effect, as already discussed. At the other extreme we have writers who are heedless of rules and careless and uncaring in their usage. That there are good writers and bad, that there are those who put some effort into making themselves intelligible and those who don’t – these are not class distinctions, they’re pragmatic observations about the world.
I found nothing ambiguous in that usage–except for an ambiguity not due to the adverb. Again:
The dude died. It was literally hunger that killed him. There is no reasonable figurative use: if you die because you don’t get enough food, that’s dying of hunger. Remember, a definition of “hunger” is “a severe lack of food.”
There is some ambiguity, due to the fact that it was a craving for food, not a lack of food, that killed him–but to blame “literally,” not “hunger,” is to kill the wrong prisoner.
Yes, the meaning was probably clear in most cases. Somebody can write that they literally died of embarrassment and you understand from the context that they didn’t literally die; that they are, in fact, still alive and are just using the word literally incorrectly. The fact that you can detect the error doesn’t mean that it isn’t an error.
If I misspell a word and you can still figure out what word I meant, does that mean I spelled it correctly?
Not at all. I’m as lower class as they come. But I pride myself on using the English language correctly.
Speaking and writing well is not a form of fashion. It’s not something a wealthy man can buy. It’s a skill you have to learn. So it’s something a poor man has as much access to as a rich man.
Orthography and word meanings are barely related: orthography isn’t a natural human behavior, it’s a specific social construct put in place to ease communication. Same with punctuation: both orthography and punctuation are artificial ways to emulate the natural behavior of speech.
Word meanings are derived from mutual agreement between speaker (or writer) and audience. If the intended audience understands the intended message, the speaker has successfully communicated.
In the case of “literally,” the problem isn’t that the intended audience is confused. The problem is that a certain subset of the audience has decided to object to a word’s usage despite its success at conveying the intended meaning. In this case, any failure of communication lies squarely at the feet of the audience.
The interesting and damning fact here is that McWhorter came to exactly the opposite conclusion, citing Hume as an example of figurative usage! It’s been a while since I read the book* so I looked up the relevant passages to make sure I had not got it all wrong. I hadn’t.
Here’s the relevant quote with the Hume passage, at the point where Mcwhorter is really on a roll and starts to cite all the supposedly figurative uses of “literally”:
The nonliteral uses of literally are quite traditional, of all things. Literally had gone past meaning “by the letter” in any sense as early as the eighteenth century, when, for example, Francis Brooke wrote The History of Emily Montague (1769), which contains this sentence: “He is a fortunate man to be introduced to such a party of fine women at his arrival; it is literally to feed among the lilies.” One cannot feed among anything “by the letter.” Or, in 1806, when the philosopher David Hume wrote, “He had the singular fate of dying literally of hunger,” in his signature history of England, despite the fact that there are no letters via which to starve. Yet this was an authoritative and highly popular volume, more widely read at the time than Hume’s philosophical treatises, equivalent to modern histories by Simon Schama and Peter Ackroyd. The purely figurative usage is hardly novel, either: the sentence I literally coined money was written by Fanny Kemble in 1863. Kemble, a British stage actress, hardly considered herself a slangy sort of person.
I agree with your reasoning on this, LHD, but the ultimate irony here is that after coming to the opposite conclusion, the linguist McWhorter had this to say (unnecessary emphasis mine): 
Who among us can say that the figurative use of literally occasions confusion of this kind?** It never does—perfect, idiomatic comprehension thrives because context always makes clear which meaning is intended.**
The bottom line here is that, much as you may get frustrated by those that you regard as language mavens, I get frustrated by the fact that so many of the attempts to justify the more egregious misuses of language, unleashed on us by liberated descriptivists running around like free-run chickens, are so badly flawed and easily refuted – like this one, or McWhorter’s attempts to show that “fast” and “practically” are contronyms, or that “really” and “literally” have equivalent meanings.
- I mentioned McWhorter’s book earlier as being titled Why English Won’t – and Can’t – Sit Still (Like, Literally), but that’s actually the subtitle, which stuck in my mind for obvious reasons. The book’s official title is Words on the Move. And it’s a good read, despite my criticisms of some of its faults.
You and McWhorter are wrong.
The incorrect use of literally in a sentence doesn’t make it incomprehensible. People can usually figure out the overall meaning from the rest of the sentence just as they can figure out the meaning of a sentence where a word is misspelled or mispronounced. People are adapted to separating out the noise of a sentence in order to discern its meaning. But that doesn’t prove that literally, used incorrectly, adds meaning.
When somebody uses literally in a sentence, the reader/listener understands one of two things from the context; either its use was the correct one or the word was meaningless. It was, as I noted above, the equivalent of a loud grunt.
If I say “I would literally kill for a pizza” I might mean that I am willing to commit murder if that’s what it takes to get some pizza. Or it might mean, I want some pizza and I’m exaggerating my desire through hyperbole.
If it’s the former case, the word literally adds to the meaning of the sentence; it says that what would otherwise sound like hyperbole is not. Saying “I would kill for some pizza” means something very different than “I would literally kill for some pizza” when you’re using the word literally correctly.
But when it’s the latter case, the word literally adds no meaning to the sentence. There’s no difference between saying “I would kill for some pizza” and “I would literally kill for some pizza.” It’s just a louder grunt.
If you disagree, provide an example where literally is used in a sentence, other than in its correct usage, in which it changes the meaning of the sentence.
I just watched a Youtube summary of the recent royal wedding. At one point the commentator, speaking of Elizabeth II Dei Gratia Regina, said “After all, she is a literal Queen.”
I was taken aback by this unnecessary adjective. Could the commentator be a Republican with the message that Elizabeth is only Queen figuratively? 
Maybe you heard wrong. Maybe what was said was “After all, she is a littoral Queen.” Which might make the heir to the throne a prince of tides?
Hah!
I’ll chime in here in support of Little Nemo. In general, I don’t have any problem with figurative use of language. That’s because it’s often clear from context anyway, but even in the case where it’s not clear, you can clear it up by using either the word “literally” or “figuratively”. A man who’s literally starving really might literally kill someone for a pizza, and if that’s what I mean, I can say “he would literally kill for a pizza”. If I just say “He would kill for a pizza”, and it’s not clear, then the person to whom I’m talking can say “Literally?”. So as long as we keep that one word, we can be free to use all the entire rest of the language however we want.
As long as we keep that one word. But once we lose “literally”, we can’t do that any more. What then?
On a completely different note: You know that place where the government meets? How’s that spelled? Wait, you mean that there’s two different, almost-but-not-quite identical words for that, depending on whether I mean the city or the building? Whose idea was that?
It appears that the separation of the two words goes all the way back into old Latin. In modern usage, the one word is also used to refer to money, but it is frowned upon to carry out lobbying/graft/bribery/kleptocracy within the hallowed halls of government, so the words are divided by spelling. All the untoward exchanges of money must occur in the city, outside the actual seat of power.
For some reason, this makes me positively homicidal. “Sue is going to the party with Bob and I”. "The cat follows Steve and I all over the house! The object of the preposition is ME, goddammit!!! :mad::mad::mad:
I get far less irritated with the opposite mistake such as, “Me and Sue went to the party together”.
Both are equal grammatical crimes, but people who use I instead of me should get the death penalty.
Read the underlined portion. He’s saying it’s figurative because it doesn’t involve starving letter-by-letter. That is, the literal meaning of literal involves its meaning letter by letter.
I’m not sure what I think of what McWhorter’s doing here–he seems to be exaggerating his opponents’ literalmindedness for effect, and I don’t think that’s particularly generous of him–but he does not, as near as I can tell, suggest that “literally” in the passage is meant in any sense except “in reality.” He just appears to be claiming that the “in reality” usage is itself figurative, since it doesn’t involve letters.
What’s incomprehensible–logically incoherent, even–is claiming that the utterance of a set of phonemes can communicate the speaker’s meaning effectively to the audience, and still be “incorrect.” That shows a fundamental misunderstanding of what language IS.
You also may be unclear on what an intensifier is; you would also do well to read the link I offered earlier, in which myriad excellent writers use “literally” as an intensifier.