If I understand your question you asking why it is wrong to use literally for emphasis? I guess that depends on whether you are a linguistic prescriptivist or not (I probably err towards that side, alas, a recipe for unhappiness!).
A linguistic prescriptivist might say it was wrong because people might say something they want to emphasise like 'my phone is literally blowing up' - but according to the traditional meaning of the word literally, that means it would be literally blowing up, like an actual explosion.
Once 'literally' just means 'emphasise this' then you have to go into further contortions if you actually want to express something that means something that is exactly as described, not figuratively.
Interestingly, "literally" itself was likely exactly such a contortion to deal with the fact that "really" became an intensifier when before it meant that the manner of something was, you know, real.
Can you show me an example? Most of the examples I've seen are cases where people are using the word "literally" in a hyperbolic sense, which I would argue is perfectly legitimate.
For example, suppose somebody says "I'm so hungry, I could literally eat an elephant." It's obvious that they're being hyperbolic because of course nobody eats elephants. Adding literally just adds to the hyperbole because it makes the sentence that much more ridiculous.
It's a figure of speech and perfectly legitimate, IMHO.
It's about mebibyte (2^20 bytes, unit symbol MiB), compared to megabyte (10^6 bytes).
For example a harddisk with a terabyte capacity does not have space for 2^30=1,099,511,627,776 bytes but about 10% less. Some disk management tools however were based on base 2 measurements, and the customer might cry foul because the tool reported only about 930 gigabytes, err gibibytes.
Another one, the word "free." Much like literally it has lost its original meaning and now means "included."
For example, "Get a free widget with this 12 month magazine subscription ($12.99/month)!" And then people will genuinely argue that the widget is "free" in spite of it being tied to $150+ in mandatory expenditure.
The word people are looking for is included, the widget is INCLUDED with a 12 month/$12.99/month subscription, there's nothing "free" about it.
Nothing about the above is contrived either, these "free" ads and claims are all around us.
Once we come up with a better name than "EcmaScript."
I can neither say that nor remember it, and while JavaScript is owned by Oracle, at least it is memorable (And everyone will know what you're talking about when you say it out loud).
Just put native TypeScript support in the browsers, and let's just use the term TypeScript and also have a language with actual types in it(!).
JavaScript is trademarked by Oracle who has been litigating aggressively to take advantage of their intellectual property. A lot of companies cannot call their versions of ECMA compliant interpreters by the name JavaScript which confuses people.
It didn't start as EMCAscript. It started as Mocha. Javascript is the most famous implementation of it, but there's also ActionScript, JScript, and countless others.
I've been calling it ES6 for a while. It reflects the variety of js that generally matters now. Also concise, and reasonably pronounceable (I'd rather say aloud "ee-es-six" than "ecmascript" which seems to me an awkward aglomeration of phonemes)
EcmaScript is a pretty bad name imo. "Ecma" sounds like it's halfway between eczema and acne and doesn't have any readily apparent meaning and "Script" is a totally meaningless suffix at this point.
Call it what you like. It doesn't matter so long as whoever you're talking to understands what you mean.
Don't we have enough change and confusion in the *Script world without also trying to change the name? I just don't understand what the value would be.
Oracle threatens to sue people who use the word "Java" without paying them.
GNU would very much like you to use "GNU" to recognize the contributions of GNU software in providing a usable operating system around the Linux kernel.
Originally it was called Mocha and went through a series of name changes and branding before Netscape acquired a trademark license from Sun Microsystem and settled on Javascript.
> JavaScript was created in May 1995 by Brendan Eich while at Netscape, reportedly in only 10 days. It was originally named Mocha, a name chosen by Netscape founder Marc Andreessen, but was renamed four months later to LiveScript. At that time, Sun Microsystems owned the trademark for JavaScript. Netscape acquired a trademark license and renamed LiveScript to JavaScript in December 1995. It was somewhat of a marketing maneuver since Java was really popular at the time. The languages are not related at all.
That's interesting... did not know. When I saw the title, I thought Ecma could use a coffee play on words[0]. Seeing Mocha, later renamed to Java, seems to partially confirm that there's a coffee backstory somewhere.
I think we should rename it to anything else which starts with the letter 'J' and ends with 'Script', or can be initialised as 'JS'. Anything else is a non-starter, because we're not going to rename countless millions of .js files.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 124 ms ] threadA linguistic prescriptivist might say it was wrong because people might say something they want to emphasise like 'my phone is literally blowing up' - but according to the traditional meaning of the word literally, that means it would be literally blowing up, like an actual explosion.
Once 'literally' just means 'emphasise this' then you have to go into further contortions if you actually want to express something that means something that is exactly as described, not figuratively.
I suppose emphasis can turn into exaggeration, then literally is indeed a bad fit. But it can be emphasizing something without exaggeration too.
I.e. "literally days ago". Which indeed can mean a few days ago, but it's emphasizing it. I don't think it's a wrong usage.
For example, suppose somebody says "I'm so hungry, I could literally eat an elephant." It's obvious that they're being hyperbolic because of course nobody eats elephants. Adding literally just adds to the hyperbole because it makes the sentence that much more ridiculous.
It's a figure of speech and perfectly legitimate, IMHO.
Seems silly to use a word in a sense opposite what it literally means for emphasis. But whatever you enjoy.
For example a harddisk with a terabyte capacity does not have space for 2^30=1,099,511,627,776 bytes but about 10% less. Some disk management tools however were based on base 2 measurements, and the customer might cry foul because the tool reported only about 930 gigabytes, err gibibytes.
For example, "Get a free widget with this 12 month magazine subscription ($12.99/month)!" And then people will genuinely argue that the widget is "free" in spite of it being tied to $150+ in mandatory expenditure.
The word people are looking for is included, the widget is INCLUDED with a 12 month/$12.99/month subscription, there's nothing "free" about it.
Nothing about the above is contrived either, these "free" ads and claims are all around us.
I can neither say that nor remember it, and while JavaScript is owned by Oracle, at least it is memorable (And everyone will know what you're talking about when you say it out loud).
Just put native TypeScript support in the browsers, and let's just use the term TypeScript and also have a language with actual types in it(!).
Only standards bodies think it's a good idea to come up with a new version of the word "version" for each major new version.
v1 = DSTU1, v2 = DSTU2, v3 = STU3, v4 = R4
I'm hoping that they call the next one "V5", just for fun.
Poor ECMA having an unfortunate starting acronym.
Don't we have enough change and confusion in the *Script world without also trying to change the name? I just don't understand what the value would be.
Oracle threatens to sue people who use the word "Java" without paying them.
GNU would very much like you to use "GNU" to recognize the contributions of GNU software in providing a usable operating system around the Linux kernel.
How exactly does one remind you of the other?
I'm not going to call it EcmaScript.
I'm not going to call it GNU / Linux.
Originally it was called Mocha and went through a series of name changes and branding before Netscape acquired a trademark license from Sun Microsystem and settled on Javascript.
> JavaScript was created in May 1995 by Brendan Eich while at Netscape, reportedly in only 10 days. It was originally named Mocha, a name chosen by Netscape founder Marc Andreessen, but was renamed four months later to LiveScript. At that time, Sun Microsystems owned the trademark for JavaScript. Netscape acquired a trademark license and renamed LiveScript to JavaScript in December 1995. It was somewhat of a marketing maneuver since Java was really popular at the time. The languages are not related at all.
Source: http://www.benmvp.com/learning-es6-history-of-ecmascript/
That's interesting... did not know. When I saw the title, I thought Ecma could use a coffee play on words[0]. Seeing Mocha, later renamed to Java, seems to partially confirm that there's a coffee backstory somewhere.
[0] https://www.powerthesaurus.org/coffee
EcmaScript has never caught on, for a number of reasons, some mentioned in earlier comments.