No, that is a hill I will die on.
But only figuratively not literally.
Ooh, now I want to get everyone to start using “figuratively” to mean what we used to call “literally”…
There seems a lot to be said on one hand for the good deeds backstory, and on the other hand for the bad deeds definition, while on the gripping hand…
No one has explained the split-brain studies to Sheldon?
Sheldon’s a physicist. Biology is just applied chemistry.
Won’t work. The people who are debasing the word literally are doing so by assigning it no meaning. They’re just using it as am empty intensifier. They’re like people who add the word “fucking” to everything they say.
So when a person says “I can’t meet you for lunch. I’m tied up at the office.” they mean they’re busy at work.
When a person says “I can’t meet you for lunch. I’m figuratively tied up at the office.” or “I can’t meet you for lunch. I’m metaphorically tied up at the office.” they mean they’re busy at work and they want you to understand that they are not actually bound by ropes at their workplace.
When an intelligent person says “I can’t meet you for lunch. I’m literally tied up at the office.” they mean they are actually bound by ropes at their workplace. You should call the police to free them.
When an unintelligent person says “I can’t meet you for lunch. I’m literally tied up at the office.” they might as well be saying “I can’t meet you for lunch. I’m anthropologically tied up at the office.” They are don’t understand what long words mean. They just throw them randomly into sentences. As I noted above, it’s no different than them saying “I can’t meet you for lunch. I’m fucking tied up at the office.”
Literally as a general intensifier, meaning “what follows is to be taken in the strongest admissible sense”, goes back to the 18th century. It’s a bit late to complain about the usage now.
And I don’t think you can object that people who use the word in this sense “don’t understand what long words mean”. This is a very well-established meaning of the word.
Stupidity is not a recent invention.
Answer me this, if a word is used as a “general intensifier” and its meaning is “what follows is to be taken in the strongest admissible sense” then consider the sentences I used in my example.
“I can’t meet you for lunch. I’m literally tied up at the office.”
“I can’t meet you for lunch. I’m anthropologically tied up at the office.”
“I can’t meet you for lunch. I’m fucking tied up at the office.”
Three different sentences with three different words used as “general intensifiers”. Are you saying literally, anthropologically, and fucking all have the same meaning? They all mean “what follows is to be taken in the strongest admissible sense”?
I’d argue that the way they are being placed in these sentences interchangeably supports my earlier statement that they are being assigned no meaning. They’re being reduced to the level of a grunt.
These words are not interchangeable.
Literally has the meaning I already suggested.
Anthopologically has no discernible meaning in this context; it’s just nonsense.
Fucking in this context suggests “I’m tied up at the office, and I’m annoyed about it”. Someone might use this construction because, e.g., they think it is or ought to be unnecessary for them to spend their lunch break at the office; they have to because someone else has messed up, or because their boss is a bully.
I never understood it to explicitly be about being at cross purposes, just that one part of an organization is unaware of what the other parts are doing. Which may put their actions at cross purposes, but it may also just prevent them from taking advantage of resources/abilities that are available to them.
So you might have a university paying big money for milk in the dining halls, yet the same university may have a large dairy science program that produces a huge amount of perfectly usable milk as part of their educational program that they’re having trouble disposing of. They’re not at cross purposes in the sense of hindering each other, but they’re not aware of each other either.
They do not. Literally is added as a legitimate intensifier and everyone will know what they mean. If I say, ‘my job is tough, they literally make me walk over coals’. No one I say that to is going think I actually walk over coals. They will understand my work expects something over and above what’s normally expected. That wouldn’t happen if I threw in a random long word.
I get it, literally should mean ‘the exact thing I said’ but it’s long sense lost that meaning exclusively.
I’ve expressed my opinions on this subject and I don’t want to hijack my own thread any further.
Worth noting that literally as an intensifier is only used in specific contexts. We would never say “I am literally busy” as an alternative to “I am very busy”, but we do say “I am literally tied to my desk” or “I am literally snowed under with work”
In other words, we use it as an intensifier for a metaphor. It means “See this metaphor? You should understand it in the strongest possible sense.”