There is standard English. It is possible for folks to use conventions that make understanding more difficult, or to neglect conventions that make understanding easier, absolutely. It is also possible for people, when walking, to stumble.
So my question stands. Were they walking properly or improperly?
Daniel
I didn’t see the two people in the previous anecdote and can’t give an informed opinion on their gait. As for the way they were speaking, they communited successfully by their own code, so it’s immaterial whether anyone else understood what they are saying. But that’s hardly the point.
I don’t understand your point, though. Do you suppose standard English was created by a couple of stuffy old schoolmasters just to annoy people, and that it impedes understanding? The standardization of English is connected to two things: the printing press, and public education. These greatly facilitated understanding among English speaking peoples by standardizing accent and spelling so that people from different regions could communicate. It also democratized English by making “proper English” – being upper crust London English – available to everyone.
No, of course not. I worked for years as a writing tutor, and I’ve taught many students how to use their semicolons and hyphens and subordinate clauses. I love grammar; I’m a big old grammar geek.
But I use a threefold standard in judging the form of an incident of communication:
The last one is a little difficult to understand. If I am writing a manual for using a digital camera, my intended aesthetic is clear, simple prose, prose that the audience does not even notice because it is so transparent. If I am writing a sonnet, my intended aesthetic involves a more complex structure, and I will probably want the audience to notice, with appreciation, a couple of unusual rhymes.
Standard English is very helpful in accomplishing all three of these goals in a wide variety of circumstances. Consider the difference between these two sentences:
The convention of offsetting nonrestrictive clauses with commas helps the reader understand the difference between the two sentences. Without this convention, the sentences would read the same, and it would be difficult for the reader to understand which meaning was intended.
Compare that to the case with “literally” used metaphorically. Nobody in this thread has given a single instance in which confusion has actually resulted. Nobody has been able to come up with a good example in which confusion would result. The author of such communications understand what he or she meant. The audience understands what was meant.
That brings us to the aesthetic. The major barrier to the aesthetic here seems to be a mystical view of language held by certain members of the audience, a view that suggests some objective standard for correct and incorrect language that exists apart from comprehension.
If I were advising an author, and if I knew the intended audience held this mystical view of language, I would certainly advise the author to avoid using “literally” metaphorically. But if I knew the intended audience had no such illusions about language (nor had other arbitrary objections to its use), I would have no problem with this usage.
Daniel
I was on my way to the store and I literally ran out of gas.
You mean you were driving?
No, I was on my bike, but I literally ran out of gas.
Like a motorcyle?
No, it’s a regular bicycle, the kind you peddle, but I literally ran out of gas.
When was it that you had this incredibly ridiculous conversation, and who was the idiot you were talking to?
Daniel
It was literally like five minutes ago. And are you calling my wife an idiot?
I presume this is clever sarcasm. Good work.
Obviously, I don’t believe you. This conversation is not how people talk: it is contrived and awkward. You’d be better served by admitting this conversation is a figment of your imagination, IMO; even flippant claims that it’s real just makes the conversation more difficult.
I will grant, however, that you have come up with an example in which someone using “literally” is incomprehensible. It appears from your example that they are using it figuratively, but it makes no sense either way what they are saying.
So: either your wife doesn’t speak English as her first tongue, or your wife has some sort of bizarre language disorder that would lead to such a poor use of the language, or we still don’t have an example of anyone actually using “literally” in a context that is confusing.
Daniel
You’ve never heard someone say they ran out of gas in either a literal or figurative sense? You really claim that “it makes no sense either way”?
Walter, step back for a second and think about it. Is that what I really said, or are you changing what I said because you’d rather argue against an easier point?
Please address my actual arguments.
Daniel
Read it again, and yep, that’s what you said. You took the position that the statement, “I literally ran out of gas” is such an alien construction that no non-disabled native speaker of English would use it. I find that claim specious and extraordinary.
No, that’s not the position I took. The position I took is that it’s highly unlikely that someone would describe taking a trip and say they “literally ran out of gas.” When you run out of gas on a trip, everyone will assume that you mean it nonmetaphorically, and you the speaker know that. If you wish to use the metaphorical version of the phrase, you’d say something like, “I felt like I had just run out of gas, I was so tired,” in order to clarify. If you wish to use the phrase nonmetaphorically, “literally” is redundant: nobody is going to think you mean anything else.
In either case, in such a phrase, it’s unlikely that “literally” would appear. Note, however, that your sample conversation is incomprehensible not because of “literally,” but because of a poor choice of metaphor: remove the word “literally,” and it’s just as incomprehensible.
My point is also that this conversation did not occur, that you made it up, because you want to demonstrate a problem where no problem actually exists. Again, there are several people in this thread decrying the “misuse” of “literally,” but not one of them has been able to point to an actual situation where such “misuse” led to confusion. You’ve come the closest, in making up an imaginary incomprehensible conversation based around a poorly-chosen metaphor; even then, the word “literally” isn’t at fault.
Daniel
Your insistence that it’s “incomprehensible,” muddies what would otherwise be a strong post. “I literally ran out of gas,” is completely comprehensible as an utterance, even likely. For example, if you google the word, you find several hundred cases where that exact expression is used. once it is used to describe a Nascar driver who ran out of gasoline, and once to describe a cyclist who was exausted… the exact cases I was jestfully providing. Note that the first use is necessary to distinguish between an automotive problem and a problem with the athlete losing his stamina. In the second case, the word has no meaning at all. It doesn’t “intensify” the metaphor; it just adds four content-free syllables to the sentence.
It seems like the most likely and most common ambiguous uses of the word are when people say, “He’s literally a half-wit,” or “He was left literally peniless,” where they may very well be exaggerating, and the use of the word “literally,” no longer indicates that they aren’t. Regardless of whether I’ve heard this happen recently, would you agree that these statements are “comprehensible” and ambiguous?
If I were editing somebody’s work, and I encountered a non-meaningful use of “literally,” I would have them strike it. I would also have them consider coming up with a fresh image instead of using a cliche.
Okay, in the first example, yes, they use it to say, “this is not a metaphor.” I think it works here, strangely, as an intensifier of sort: it says, “strange and unusual as this may be, it actually happened.” In the second example, they use it metaphorically, to describe a biker who lost energy.
YOu say that these are the exact cases you were jestfully providing. No, actually, they are the exact opposite. In reading either of these examples, did you see any ambiguity at all? I certainly didn’t, and from your analysis of them, I don’t think you did, either. Which is exactly my point: in real-world communication, “literally” does not lead to confusion. Your “exact cases” were engineered to lack the context that conversations have: you put the phrase in the mouth of someone who did not clarify the context in which the phrase was being used, and who insisted on not providing such clarification.
Again: in the (very interesting, BTW) real-world examples of the phrase’s use that you Googled, there’s no ambiguity whatsoever as to the author’s intended meaning. In your imagined conversation, there is ambiguity. That’s the difference.
Sure for the second one, not for the first one (what kind of jerk uses “half-wit” in a nonmetaphorical sense these days?). I’ve never heard “literally” used like this that I can remember, but the use of “literally” would make the phrase exactly as ambiguous as it would be without the word.
Daniel
I suppose I should add a disclaimer: I do not think the word “literally” renders any writing, no matter how opaque, suddenly transparent and crystalline. It can be used in bad writing just as can any other word in the language. My objection is to the idea that the use of “literally” in a metaphorical sense is inherently a remarkable, incorrect, or obfuscatory use.
Daniel
The case with the bicyclist is exactly the example you require – it’s confusing to say a cyclist “literally ran out of gas,” and I did wonder what they meant by it. While it may be possible to answer that question from other sentences, it is often possible to puzzle out the meaning of agammatical or ambiguous sentences from other clues in the text. That doesn’t meant the sentence under question is itself unambiguous or not confusing.
You’ve also stated that only a non-native speaker or brain damaged person would even use this statement “literally ran out of gas”, then quickly say that the exact sequence of words in exactly the same context (cycling) is completely different.
Most comical is your argument that the use of the word “literally” renders a sentence like “he was literally peniless,” no less ambiguous than it was before… this is true precisely because the careless and non-meaningful use of the word is so ubiquitous. Were there no interjection of the word when it adds no meaning to a sentence, then we would know the use of the word was deliberate and meant that the following words were no figure of speech but a technically accurate representation of events. I wonder which side of this “debate” you are on, if you believe that “literally” has completely lost it’s utility, then we are very much in agreement on that point.
No, sorry. It’s an intensifier in its alternate meaning, just like the word very. In a majority of the cases where very is used, you can also drop it with no loss of meaning. Does that mean very should never be used? No, because it’s an optional marker to indicate how much emphasis you want to place on a particular phrase. Same as with literally.
Literally’s main meaning has not lost its utility, as it’s quite distinguishable in how it’s used. Look at m-w.com’s example for definition 1: ‘took the remark literally’. Can you drop literally and have it still make sense? ‘[He] took the remark.’ Doesn’t look like it. I will grant that example 2 manages to provide some arguable ambiguity, but set in a particular context that chance for ambiguity lessens. I’d personally say clinically insane instead of literally, simply because the possibility for ambiguity is there, which goes back to my point about poor communication not necessarily being a word’s fault, but the communicator’s.
(As an aside, IMO the broadening of insane to not only mean having a mental disorder but also extreme or absurd is more worthy of a gripe than literally. There is far more ambiguity in “Jack’s insane.” than “Jack’s literally lost his mind.”)
Bullshit. That’s not what I’ve said. I said YOUR SPECIFIC EXAMPLE was incoherent in a way that only someone with a language disorder or ESL would speak. That was an exagerration, I admit: someone who’s a very poor communicator might say YOUR SPECIFIC EXAMPLE.
You’re baiting and switching. The article you quoted is A DIFFERENT EXAMPLE. It provides context cues.
This is begging the question. Why not say that it’s ambiguous because “penniless” can be used to mean “poor” or “without any money at all”? You’re focusing on an innocent word trapped in a poorly constructed sentence.
No, “literally” has not lost its utility. As I said, your ability to construct hypothetical poorly-formed sentences containing the word just points to an ability to communicate poorly, not to a problem with the language.
You’d benefit from reading what I say instead of from assuming you already understand it. For the last several posts, you’ve demonstrated that you do not understand the argument I am making; if you continue to say that you’ve read it and understood it but don’t change your interpretation of it, I’ll know that it’s not possible to continue to discuss this with you.
Daniel
I know the word “intensifier” is used, but I fail to see how a sentence can be “intensified” by adding extra syllables. It strikes me as a linguist’s non-judgmental attempt to explain the frequent use of a word when it means nothing at all. Not being a linguist, I am not afraid to say, “often used willy-nilly by people who don’t know what it means, or by careless people who aren’t very articulate.” I think of it something like the word “like” as it is used by teenagers.
You really don’t see that? It’s very obvious and extremely common; I can easily think of many examples where this commonly occurs.
That means the same thing as, “You don’t see that? It’s obvoius and common; I can think of examples where this occurs.” Only more intensely.
Daniel