“Poor semantics?”
Well, fine, “usage”, if you want to take all the fun discussion out of it. I thought we’d moved on to “literally” perhaps not literally meaning what literally means.
Geez. If I said, “I am fucking angry!” do you all wonder what me being mad has to do with me being horny?
To butcher Freud, sometimes an intensifier is just an intensifier.
So, “literally” is , let’s just say, a little less unique than it used to be? It’s so ironic how I feel about that.
Bless his heart.
I know at least two people where you could, in the original sense of the idiom, say “Let’s just say she’s fucked the whole rugby team”.
Ok, now that’s just ironic, isn’t it?
And I mean that in the original sense of the word.
Not than it used to be. It’s been used to mean “figuratively” for over a hundred years, and by people whose writing has defined good American style.
I’ve argued before (well, okay, I quoted someone else’s much more cogent argument that someone being the American Heritage Dictionary) that it also makes perfect sense to acknowledge that “unique” can be rationally regarded as a matter of degree . . .
We’re all mad here.
“…and that’s why Bob’s your uncle!” 
Such as? Not saying you’re wrong, just wondering who you’re talking about here.
Also, maybe I’m being too picky here, but it’s never really used to mean “figuratively”, is it? I.e., it’s not used to convey that the speaker is speaking figuratively; it’s used as an intensifier in a sentence where the speaker may be speaking figuratively. I can’t think of a sentence where you could actually replace “literally” with “figuratively” (which is not an intensifier) and leave the meaning unchanged.
Even so, I think it’s a shame that we don’t have a word that’s actually reserved to mean “I’m not speaking figuratively.” English would have plenty of intensifiers even without using “literally” for this purpose.
Mark Twain described Tom Sawyer as “literally rolling in wealth,” and Gatsby “literally glowed.” Feel free to point out to Twain and Fitzgerald their shortcomings as prose stylists.
I got these from an article I read by a dictionary editor at Random House, by the way.
I’ll give you Twain, but as for The Great Gatsby, well… let’s just say you might as well have written “Chuck E. Cheese’s pizza is made in Chinese sweatshops from dog cheese, Wonder bread, and Slim Jims, shipped to the US on dry ice, and reheated with hair dryers, so feel free to point out to Chuck his shortcomings as a pizza chef!”
I think you may like or dislike his books, but as a prose stylist he is practically (by which I mean as opposed to completely, not as opposed to theoretically) unmatched.
Quandoque bonus dormitat Homerus.
While reading this thread, I’ve been trying to think of possible reasons why people begin to misuse phrases like “let’s just say.” My best guess is that it’s yet another instance of what I’ve heard described as “verbal filler.” At its most basic, verbal filler is when someone’s mind works ever-so-slightly slower than their mouth and instead of inserting a pause into his speech (God forbid), he’ll insert words and phrases such as “like,” “you know,” “um,” and so forth.
Though I’ve only been pondering this idea for a couple of minutes, it seems like the next step for our typical pontificator might be to start picking out and using longer phrases that he doesn’t exactly know the meaning of, but sounded pretty good when he heard them before and could conceivably relate to what he’s saying. As Ogre pointed out, “let’s just say” can be used to good effect by someone with a good idea of what the phrase is supposed to mean. On the other hand, someone who’s not so well-versed in witticisms and bon mots, or possibly stoned, might hear the words “let’s just say” and add them to his mental bank-of-funny-phrases-to-repeat-later-to-different-people (I know I have one of these). Then, when he needs a segue, which “let’s just say” sounds like, that is also funny, which it was in a different context, he can pull it out of the box without really thinking too hard about it and the situation described in the OP takes place.
Though I can’t think of any off the top of my head, I think there’s a whole category of words and phrases that start off as being funny and witty and then get turned into verbal filler though some process that I am probably not qualified to conjecture about, even though I just did.
Does any of this make sense? What other words have undergone this degrading transition in usage?
There are circumstances in which that sentence could work. If, for instance, the speaker is notorious for being uptight or not smoking pot or something, the sentence could be interpreted, “The party was pretty wild…and, well, lets just say I smoked a bunch of weed” (with the implication that if the party was so wild that the anti-drug, uptight speaker was smoking weed, the other guests were doing something even worse)
I know what you mean, even though I can’t think of any uses off the top of my head either.
There’s a guy here at work who drives me crazy saying, “Fair enough?” all the freaking time. He uses it to mean, “Do you understand?” - which I suppose is okay, but sometimes it just doesn’t work, depending on his context.
I agree with the OP, that certain people use “catch phrases” without knowing the full meaning behind them.
Well, yes, becuase in the draft version, Twain had a scene (later edited out) where:
After Tom recieved the following items: *a kite, in good repair; a dead rat and a string to swing it with, twelve marbles, part of a jews-harp, a piece of blue bottle-glass to look through, a spool cannon, a key that wouldn’t unlock anything, a fragment of chalk, a glass stopper of a decanter, a tin soldier, a couple of tadpoles, six fire-crackers, a kitten with only one eye, a brass doorknob, a dog-collar – but no dog – the handle of a knife, four pieces of orange-peel, and a dilapidated old window sash- * Tom then placed all the items on the sidewalk and rolled back and forth over them. He just missed squashing the kitten, as even a kitten with one eye can see when the getting is good, and the cat had made off with a good portion of said dead rat. The pollywogs weren’t so lucky.
Afterwards, Aunt Polly had to remove several items from various sections of Tom’s anatomy with a pair of needle-nosed pliers. :eek:
I was once given a bunch of forms to fill out and the earnest and friendly clerk pointed out where I should put my “John Henry.”
It was quicker to just sign my name and get the heck outta there than launch into a miniature history lesson.