I say thee nay! I will fight for literally. This is a hill I am willing to die on (possibly literally)!
No need to apologize. After all, you are brain damaged. Meta, right?
Nope.
For example a large majority of English speakers think “begs the question” is a synonym for “raises the question”
Just because they are in the majority does not make them correct.
shrug Tilt against windmills if you must. You can’t stop the English language and how people use it. “Literally” will continue to be used as an intensifier by millions daily worldwide. And people will understand what it means.
In matters of language, yes. Yes, it does. How else would language work? To be fair, I skirt the issue of running into insufferable pedants by saying “suggests the question” or “prompts the question,” but “begs the question” is perfectly cromulent as far as I’m concerned.
The purpose of words is to communicate thoughts and ideas. If no one is confused, mission accomplished. Prescriptivists can cope and seethe. As the kids say these days.
People are not confused when “literally” is used as an incredulous intensifier, I agree. But I have run into situations where I wanted to communicate that something literally happened, but the way I would naturally word it could be interpreted as an intensifier. And it is annoying to have to figure out how to reword things in a way to make my meaning clear.
I accept that “literally”, like any other word, means whatever people use it to mean. But I also understand the frustration in situations like the above, and disagree that there is never any confusion.
English just has a really hard time with having a single word that means “not figuratively.” I’m curious if this is true of other languages.
I feel there are a lot of people who have some weird notion of the “purity” of language, and that a language should remain static, and established usage should remain preserved in amber, and that any change portends language’s demise into cacophonous nonsense. Or something like that. For me, that’s the fun part of language. It’s living and changing and new ways of using it arise organically. I love reading about Gen Z and Gen Alpha slang, and when my kids use words and phrases I’ve never heard before, I love the color and imagination of it rather than striking it down as nonsense. The other day I was having trouble getting a sentence out of my mouth, and my 9-year-old says “Dad’s brain isn’t braining.” I’ve never heard “brain” verbed before, but it’s such a clever usage. Using “literally” as an intensifier, I admit, is not anywhere near as clever and, frankly, I will agree it’s a bit of a trite usage, but I don’t see anything wrong with it, and the idea that it is confusing befuddles me, as I’ve never been confused by it in my day-to-day speech, where it is used commonly enough.
Again, NO ONE is or claimed to be CONFUSED by the usage and did not understand it. It is simply stupid.
OK, then let me not direct that part to you. I’ve more than a handful of times come across the idea that OMG, if you accept “literally” as an intensifier however shall we figure out when someone is using the word “literally” to mean “in a literal manner.” (Which one poster did ask above.) I can somewhat understand thinking it’s dumb. However, I don’t see how it’s any dumber than using similar words like “really” or “actually” or “truly” but that’s just me.
I do not believe language must remain static and pure. However, there are some things that grind my gears because the word is used exactly the oposite of what it means. There are ways to intesify something if it needs it. Literally is not a good choice as it does not mean figurative/metaphor. It means in reality. Begs the questing I surrender on because that has jumped the shark in meaning. Frankly, it sounds like it is being used as meant. The actual/original? meaning of Begs the question is a rhetorical device that doesn’t come up in common conversation often. So I give on that one.
Apropos of nothing…
I was going through a box of old pictures and mementos from my dearly departed mother’s stash of stuff. I came across her 9th grade yearbook, and read through the things people had written to her.
I can report that, in Southern California in 1965, at least among 14 years olds, “bitchin” meaning “good” was popular slang.
Depending on context, it could very well be confusing.
If you say that you literally kicked someone in the balls, I’m going to assume that you had swung your foot into someone’s crotch. If you only meant it as an intensifier and that isn’t what happened, but rather you ruined someone socially by your actions and caused them great embarrassment, your misuse of the word has given me the wrong information and I am going to think that you’ve physically attacked someone.
It is true that language is fluid, and meanings change over time. But it’s also true that words need to mean something, and if you use those words incorrectly, you can’t effectively communicate.
Language is always going to be a matter of navigating a way between both of those truths. While saying that a word means what it means and will always mean that and can’t ever mean anything else is bullshit, saying that any word can mean anything and that’s okay because that’s how language works is equally bullshit.
ETA: I’ll add too that there are ways to use the term as an intensifier without causing confusion. If you instead said you “literally” knocked someone past the moon with a put-down, I’m not going to think they’ve traveled into outer space. In context that’s obvious.
Here’s the thing: it is not being used to mean exactly its opposite. The reason it works as an intensifier is because it is meant to be read as meaning “literally” but in a hyperbolic manner. It absolutely does not mean “figuratively”. That’s incorrect. That would undercut the whole point of having an intensifier and hyperbolic usage.
See, I don’t use those words to mean figurative. I would probably say: "That athlete is playing/running like they’re on fire. Like as in the extremely simplified definition of metaphor.
Yes, it theoretically could be, yet I have never in my actual, real life come across a situation where it was unclear. I’ve always been able to tell if the “literally” was meant to humorously point out the literal nature of an idiom that is typically not literal, or if it is merely being used as an intensifier. As I said above, in all our discussions on this tired old topic on the Dope, I only recall one example where there may have been some ambiguity.
Don’t start looking at the way people use the word “unique”.
I agree with this. I avoid the common usage of “literally”, because I find it grating. But it’s not a wrong usage. We’re just not a member of the speech community that uses it that way.
literally - Wiktionary, the free dictionary
Literally is the opposite of figuratively and many authorities object to the use of literally as an intensifier for figurative statements. For example “you literally become the ball”, without any figurative sense, means actually transforming into a spherical object, which is clearly impossible. Rather, the speaker is using literally as an intensifier, to indicate that the metaphor is to be understood in the strongest possible sense. This type of usage is common in informal speech (“she was literally in floods of tears”).
(Last sentence emphasized by me.)
Don’t get me started…
This thread is, like, literally boring, amirite?
I have in real life. And the problem is that the more you emphasize the word “literally”, when you are trying to be emphatic, it sounds like you’re trying to make it clear that this is something that “literally” happened.
But again, I’m not a purist, and in the right context the word can (and does) have utility outside of the traditional usage. I guess like anything else, the lazier you are about language, the more likely it is that you are going to be misunderstood. That pretty much goes for any kind of communication.