As far as can make up these days it seems standard for most people to say ‘We were literally packed in like sardines.’
This grates my ears and will always be considered wrong to me. But it seems like the majority of people say that rather than ‘We were packed in like sardines.’
So how can I say it is wrong. Anyway.
My question is how is this word ‘literally’ functioning in these sentences like ‘We were literally packed in like sardines?’ Is it a verbal explamation point? Is it actually meaning the opposite of the true meaning - Really; actually.
Ask’s dictionary has this to say
ask
lit·er·al·ly (lĭt’ər-ə-lē)
adverb
In a literal manner; word for word: translated the Greek passage literally.
In a literal or strict sense: Don’t take my remarks literally.
Usage Problem
Really; actually: “There are people in the world who literally do not know how to boil water” (Craig Claiborne)
Used as an intensive before a figurative expression.
usage note
Usage Note: For more than a hundred years, critics have remarked on the incoherency of using literally in a way that suggests the exact opposite of its primary sense of “in a manner that accords with the literal sense of the words.” In 1926, for example, H.W. Fowler cited the example “The 300,000 Unionists … will be literally thrown to the wolves.” The practice does not stem from a change in the meaning of literally itself—if it did, the word would long since have come to mean “virtually” or “figuratively”—but from a natural tendency to use the word as a general intensive, as in They had literally no help from the government on the project, where no contrast with the figurative sense of the words is intended.
Many years ago, far far away there were two words that had different meanings. One was literally, the other, his half brother figuratively. Although many people could tell them apart, some less observant types thought they were the same. They started to use literally when they meant figuratively. Some kindly folks, rather than correct them, decided to allow literally to mean both literally and figuratively according to context.
This process will be completed when we hear commentary like:
What a great touchdown. He literally ran like a gazelle.
He sure did Dan and the crowd literally brought the roof down.
Yes I think they are figuratively unbeatable with that 56 point lead now the 2 minute warning has gone.
Bah! Not at all how it happened. What happened is that folks realized saying “figuratively” undercut the power of one’s exaggeration, whereas saying “literally” juiced up the exaggeration a bit. Folks love to tell tall tales, so they started using “literally,” in the same way that they use “really.”
Does it piss you off when folks say, “that really chaps my hide”?
This is my favourite bullshit the-language-is-always-changing thing. You have two words that effectively mean black and white, but because a bunch of people can’t tell the difference we are meant to extrapolate from the rest of the sentence what they mean.
A nice big glass of black milk.
As pure as the driven black snow.
I’ve always thought that it lends an extra layer of hyperbole to the already hyperbolic metaphor. If someone says, “We were packed in like sardines” the thought response would be “Not really”. But if you add the word “literally” do the equation, it forces the listener to really visualize of a pack of sardines. IMHO.
Exactly my point. By adding literally I immediately think, “laying side by side like dead fish in a can.” Is this the image that I was intended to receive?
Don’t forget covered in oil, ad wiuth heads cut off: the people packed like sardines have to be headless and covered in oil to complete the literal image.
Huh? Is that the actual information you’re trying to impart? That you were all physically lying side by side like sardines?
The misuse of “literally” is nails on a chalkboard to me and I don’t want to hear any shit rom the apologists who say that the meaning has changed or that the wrong meaning is now acceptsbale. Just because a lot of people use the word wrong doesn’t make their usage correct.
Anyway, if the word can no longer be relied upon to convey it’s original meaning then what word CAN be used to communicate the idea that you’re speaking non-figuratively? We need simething else to convey that if idiots really have stolen “literally” for good (and rendered it a semantically null word in the process).
I don’t know about this. The whole point of any simile or metaphor is to get the listener to think of something as “like” something else in some way. It’s a sad day when language can’t do that without some big neon sign-word like “literally” indicating that the next thing being said is a simile/metaphor. (BTW, “neon sign-word” is itself a metaphor; would it be better if I wrote “big, literally neon sign-word”?).
The sardines simile is not to get you to think people=sardines, but to get you to think that people were as close together as sardines are in the traditional tin package. Using “literally” in this case cannot be justified logically, but there are dozens of words/phrases (“irregardless”, “could care less”) that are just as illogical; we live with them because language is mainly a democratic process, and sometimes democracy makes illogical choices (please please do not take that as a political statement; I’m sure we can all think of our own examples of this).
I’m not saying that using “literally” this way is not a misuse of the word. I’m sure it is. But for me, it’s vaguely humurous whenever somebody is recounting a situation and punctuates the simile he used by adding “literally”. It doesn’t bother me too much. I’ve only heard the word “literally” used this way (i.e. for extra emphasis, humour, etc).
If they are using ‘literal’ in its formal sense then saying ‘we were packed in literally like sardines’ would mean ‘twelve of us were jammed together in tepid oil into the space of a small tin’. It’s possible but not probable.
If you don’t want to hear dissenting views, what are you doing in this forum?
Folks haven’t answered the question clearly. “Literally” has, as its literal meaning, almost exactly the same meaning as “really.” But very few folks object to expressions like, “He really tore into her.”
If you’ve got a C++ program for a brain that can’t deal with flexibility in language usage, expressions like “he really tore into her” should bother you every bit as much as expressions like “We were literally packed in there like sardines.” There should be no difference between, “He literally hit the roof” and, “He really hit the roof.”
But I don’t see folks making the same objection to “really” that they make to “literally.”