The word “literally” is an intensifier; do you have the same objection to the use of ‘really’, or ‘actually’? ‘Literally’ was first used to mean “from the text” in the late 17th c. By the early 19th c. it was already fully co-opted as an intensifier.
It still doesn't feel like "literally" has been fully co-opted to me, at least not for anyone who isn't a teenager. I'd same the same about "actually", but I don't think I've even heard teenagers use it as a mere intensifier.
My theory of literally is that it's being used to indicate a literal rendition of the speaker's mental state. So it doesn't mean figuratively, it means "this exclamation is the most direct rendering of how I feel about this. " That is, it's literal because nothing was changed from the verbal impulse that immediately sprang to mind.
Not really an autoantonym, as the syntax of the sentence will only ever permit one or the other. ("Left" [remaining] is passive, while "left" [went away] is intransitive and therefore cannot be passive.)
Cool site / fun list. But -- and I realize this is pedantic, though if ever there were a time/place for it, it's commentary on a grammar site -- I feel "resign" doesn't quite belong on it. Resign (to sign again) is pronounced with a soft "ess", while (to quit) uses a "z" sound; they're different words w/ different pronunciations that happen to share the same spelling. Doesn't that make them homographs? Is there a special term for this case, perhaps homographic antonym, or anto-homograph?
Yeah, but that's a really challenging line to draw diachronically.
For example, clip = to fasten originates from Old English `clyppan` (to embrace/clasp/surround), while clip = to cut originates somewhere Scandanavian, as in Old Norse' `klippa` (to clip/shear). Are those still homographs? I think a fair number of the list items are the result of convergent evolution.
Homographs are words that are written identically. I don't understand what you're trying to ask - the etymology of a word is not at all relevant to how it's spelled.
It's a heteronym, see[1]. And etymologically they seem to be related, the sense "quit" dating back to the 14th century while the sense "sign again" a more recent addition, 19th century [2]
While we're at it, literally doesn't belong on it. Literally has exactly one meaning. Unsurprisingly, the wrong meaning is the opposite of the right one.
Still think this list would help every struggling learner of English.
That kinda depends on how you define things though. literally in the sense of something that actually happened is clearly the meaning of the word. You can then debate on whether literally as in figuratively would be a separate meaning for the same word, or just hyperbole.
However, he may not be interested in talking to (or hiring) people who misuse a word and claim that the correct use is a matter of perspective.
We can be descriptive in saying that people use "literally" when they don't mean "literally" - we can also be descriptive when we label such people as ignorant of the meaning of the words they use.
That's not descriptive, that's presumptuous and elitist. How do you know they're ignorant? Maybe they know perfectly well what the word means and are using it for humorous effect, or as an extreme intensifier.
> he may not be interested in talking to (or hiring) people who misuse a word and claim that the correct use is a matter of perspective.
Because that would be the worst. No one ever says something while meaning something else.
When, while sitting at the table, people ask me if I can pass them the water, I check if I can reach the bottle, I check if I'm close enough to them, then I say "yes, I can" and keep eating.
My brother did something similar growing up. In Swedish a common way to ask the time is "Vad är klockan?", literally translating to "What is the watch?". To which I got "An invention that tells the time" or some variation thereof for years...
I wonder how many languages' time-telling questions could be susceptible of a different literal interpretation.
It seems like the Spanish and Portuguese could be literally taken as "what are hours?" ("intervals of sixty minutes!") (although I don't think it would be the most idiomatic way to ask that question in either language), while one German option is "how late is it?" ("not very!").
There's another German question which could be taken as "how much clock is it?", but since clocks are usually discrete objects, it might be quite a strain to try to take this as a question about something's clock-nature. (Maybe if you were looking at Dalí's Persistence of Memory, you could answer something like "this one is not very much clock".)
> You may be interested in linguistic descriptivism, as opposed to linguistic prescriptivism:
So are you prescribing to me that I must accept "figuratively" as a valid definition for "literally"?
My take is that language is a democratic activity. I never voted for the people who decided "they" must always be plural, and could never stand-in for a third-person singular of unknown gender. I think that use is simple, sensible, and solves a genuine problem in the language; every time I use "they" in the third-person-singular, I "vote" for that to be an acceptable use case.
On the other hand, the only reason to use the word "literally" is to say that this thing actually happened. That is the meaning of the word. Using it to mean "figuratively" doesn't fix a missing hole in the language; on the contrary, it opens up a hole, because low you don't know if the thing actually happened, or if the guy is just using the word "literally" to mean the opposite of "literally". If we just give up, and start saying "actually" instead of "literally", then eventually the same linguistic process will corrupt "actually", and all other variations, as well.
People who use the word "literally" as an intensifier are casting their vote for how to use the language. When I make fun of those people, I'm casting my vote, that I don't like their usage. I will continue to do so, and argue with anyone who disagrees with me, as long as it's practical to do so.
> So are you prescribing to me that I must accept "figuratively" as a valid definition for "literally"?
No, they are describing the fact that it is used that way, whether you like it or not.
That said, while I totally accept the usage, and don't have a problem with people saying "I literally died laughing" (because the phrase "I died laughing" is already on the face of it a statement of fact, and yet we have no problem understanding that it's figurative, so any modifiers -- I seriously died laughing, I totally died laughing -- are just intensifying the hyperbole), I personally don't think it should have been added to the dictionary.
People already use intensifiers when being hyperbolic (as above, "I seriously died laughing," "I totally died laughing"), we don't need to add to the definition of all of them. It's a valid part of the constellation of "intensifier + idiom," and each intensifier doesn't need to be singled out.
"Died" is already an intensifier -- and a pretty extreme one. But because of overuse, it's become meaningless; and so now people feel like they have to add more intensifiers: "seriously", "totally", "literally", etc. Eventually all those will be so overused that they become meaningless too.
I think saying "I died laughing" is a fine idiom. But the continual slipping into "cranking up the volume", and having more and more words mean nothing, is bad for the language. So, I vote to oppose this.
You have a vote too. Think about the way you want the language to be, and then vote by using it that way, and / or arguing with people who use it the way you don't like.
I actually have a strong memory of being about 4 or 5 (before I would have heard the phrase), and laughing at a joke my dad told so hard that I couldn't breathe for a moment, and then being genuinely furious at him, telling him "I could have died!"
I've seen the phrase "busy to death" ("忙死了"), and "missed you to death" ("念死了"), so I think Chinese are just more prone to die of extreme emotions. ;-)
It seems like a lost battle.
If a person you don't know well uses literally, you already cannot know without context if they mean figuratively if the fact being qualified is remotely plausible. It's broken beyond repair. No hope for healing. Literally is no more. It's passed on. It has ceased to be. It's expired and has gone to see its maker. It's an ex-word.
As I said elsewhere, when someone says "I've been waiting for days" and it's actually been minutes, we don't say "days sometimes means minutes". We say they were exaggerating for effect. It's a different use of the same meaning.
I think it's the same for "literally". Hyperbolic use of the original meaning. If "literally" meant "figuratively" we would expect to see sentences that would be interpreted as literal but for the inclusion of "literally", and I don't think I have ever seen one.
Include me among those who find it frustrating, but the meanings of words are more or less acquired by convention, and I think my side has been outvoted on this one.
I remember trying to explain this to a friend once, but was having a 'senior moment' and couldn't remember the word 'figuratively' to explain what 'literally' should have been in the context. Now it is used as an intensifier, but it seems to be 'sarcastic' when used in that way... there's some understanding that exaggeration is being used, and that the use of the word 'literal' isn't entirely correct.
It might be more precise to call it hyperbole than sarcasm. But either is pretty reasonable. Both are rhetorical devices that hinge on creating an effect by intentionally using a word differently than its normal, plain meaning.
Incidentally, I think one reason people get irritated by this is that some people prefer communication to be direct, unambiguous, and straightforward without relying on a lot of subtlety, context, guessing, or interpretation. I'd bet that programmers and other technically-minded people lean this direction more. So when people complain that this sort of thing is a violation of the rules, I think on some level they know that's not true, so I'm inclined to interpret it more like a plea or protest to avoid this style of indirect communication.
The "figuratively" sense is just bog-standard hyperbole. Do you also object to "killed" in the sense of a stand-up comedian getting a lot of laughter during their act? Or "I just died of embarrassment!"?
It's not hyperbole. When you say something was "so funny I died", that's exactly what 'figurative' means. I don't object to the use of the facetious/sarcastic/exaggerating use of 'literally', but when used in that way, people are literally (sorry!) being figurative. I think the problem arises when something in speech starts out being sarcastic or out of proportion consciously, but gets used so much that people forget this and start changing the actual meaning of the words being used. I think it often comes about because terms and phrases get re-used by people who don't actually understand them... like a small child repeating a pun or quip they've heard an adult use, but don't really understand, and then they grow up using some part of speech incorrectly.
With all the political discussion about Britain recently, the table/table antonym described in this list has come up among my friends lately. In Britain, you "table" a motion to put it up for consideration. In the US, if a motion is "tabled" it is put off until later. Very closely related but directly opposite meanings makes for some confusing discussions, where you need to know the nationality of the writer to have any chance of understanding the statement.
I take "I could care less" to mean "I could care even less about this than I already do, that's how little it matters to me", but that could just be me trying to rationalize a mangled expression.
Well, yes, but it's always possible to care less about something, unless you are already at the state of absolute-uncaring. Therefore, "I could care less" does nothing to express the desired sentiment.
"I couldn't care less" is a much clearer reference to being at this state of absolute-uncaring.
I think the intended meaning by those who say it is: I'm currently caring too much because I'm talking about it even a little bit. I could easily care even less than this.
What you said exactly makes no sense. If you said "I could NOT care less" it would mean, you care so little that it is not possible to care less than you do currently.
Regardless, I think this is just a result of people getting lazy with their language... it is not meant to be said in this say, and is properly stated, "I couldn't care less". In the US (can't speak for elsewhere) people just repeat what they think others have said, to convey what they think they understood. This is the source of a lot of language rot.
> “I could care less” is a bastardization of couldn’t care less.
I've come to the conclusion that this bastardization came from the way "--dn't c--" feels in the mouth. Lots of consonant sounds in a row. Drop the "n't" and it feels much better to say, even though the phrase becomes nonsense. You even get a little bonus alliteration.
Thanks for the link. It seems to support my hypothesis about "mouthfeel" and doesn't mention sarcasm at all, so I have to admit I don't understand your comment.
Do many people really say "I could care less" instead of "couldn't"? I've never heard anyone say it, and the few times I've seen it used online the perpetrator has rightly been rounded upon.
If people do, what similar turns of phrase would they likewise mangle? "Well done son, I could be more proud", or "I'm completely thrilled, I could be happier", or "I'm at rock bottom, things could be worse".
Yes, I've definitely heard it many times. Unlike the other examples you suggest, I think it's become common enough to begin to be a semantic unit, whose meaning is not perceived to be a function of its parts.
-I could/couldn't care less: I feel this started out properly as "couldn't" and then people got lazy/used shortcuts in their speech. Very much like a "for all intentional purposes" type of phrase that has been incorrectly said
-Entree: again just speculation... I think the US usage of this may have come from European multicourse meals... depending on the number of courses, you may start with hors d'oeuvres, soup, salad, etc... then move on to a First (Entree) and a Second as mains, before moving on to the wrap up with aperitifs, coffee, dessert, etc. As restaurants become more popular and accessible to the lower/working classes, courses were consolidated, and what was once called Entree/opener as a first main dish became the primary course of the meal.
It's a Yiddishism that spread outside of its community. For a while, already used as the Germans use schön and other similar constructions were also common. Some stuck as idioms of American English; others have faded.
> A number of language writers have suggested that “could care less” has a sarcastic reading, conveying something like “Ha! As if there were something in the world I could care less about.” There are some American Yiddish-inflected phrases that work this way, like “I should be so lucky!” (meaning “there’s no way I’m ever gonna be that lucky”) or “I should care!” (why should I care?). Even if “could care less” didn’t originate from a sarcastic intent, it matches up well enough with these other forms in the language to help give it staying power.
I particularly like this argument from this second link:
> The argument of logic falls apart when you consider the fact that both these phrases are idioms. In English, along with other languages, idioms aren’t required to follow logic, and to point out the lack of logic in one idiom and not all idioms is…illogical. Take the expression “head over heels,” which makes far less sense than “heels over head” when you think about the physics of a somersault. It turns out “heels over head” entered English around 1400, over 250 years before “head over heels,” however, the “logical” version of this idiom hasn’t been in popular usage since the late Victorian era.
"Terrific" used to be a synonym for "terrible", and "awesome" for "awful". Even the word "bad" has a slang meaning of "good".
In Japanese 適当 is supposed to mean "appropriate, proper", but in practice it almost always means "unserious, sloppy, careless". Not sure how that came about.
"Awesome" and "Aweful" have similar etymologoies: both mean, "Inspiring or creating awe". But one has morphed into, "really good", and the other into "really bad".
This. It can be used more colloquially than the equivalent meaning of "terrible," where it's closer to something like "awesome." It can also generally used as a marker of intensity. In no case does it mean "bad at something."
A passage in the "Vogue book of manners" from the '30's insisted that one never, ever say that a woman's dress was terrific, with literally no explanation.
I used to work on a San Francisco team with a Zurich counterpart, mostly staffed with people of Italian descent. There was a quite confusing situation once involving a misunderstanding of my use of "terrific"; they thought I was calling something horrifyingly bad. Another such situation went something like this:
Me: "I tried what you suggested and now everything's hunky-dory."
Them, 12 hours later: "Well if you're going to complain about my suggestion, I wish you'd have at least explained what was wrong with it.
That’s interesting. I’m an American who frequently talks to brits, and I’ve never picked up on the different meaning of quite. I’ll make a point to listen for that in the future.
English English speaker here: quite is often used both ways. While it is defined as meaning "fairly" it is usually used to mean a little more than that ("the weather is quite nice" means somewhere between "the weather is fair" and "the weather is nice"), it is also used to mean entirely but usually in a sarcastic manner where the juxtaposition of the entirelyness of your intent and the fairlyness of the actually meaning of the word stands out ("oh, you are quite wrong there"). Also, in combination with a negative it usually means entirely (as in "the job isn't quite done yet").
These are far from hard & fast rules though. In spoken situations the intended meaning is generally obvious from tone, in written text it can be quite ambiguous.
There is at least one use where the word means both at once: when it is used on its own: Person one: "The man is an utter 'king imbecile", Person two: "Quite" or P1: "WOOOOOOHOOOOOOO!!!!!!", P2: "Quite". Here it means "I agree (on a binary yes/no level) but I wouldn't put it that strongly". Similar to how "indeed" is often used.
Original means the origin/birth in both examples, the difference lies not in the meaning of original but in the word it affects (The telling, or the story itself)
Great list! My favorite is on it. The verb "sanction" is my "favorite" since the two meanings are both political and totally opposite. If you just read "the United States sanctioned the action" you have literally no idea if it means they expressly allowed it, no problem go right ahead, or if it means they were so mad they did something negative in response, oh, we're punishing you for that. I would say you can't even use the word for that reason.
I think the two meanings of "oversight" are not quite interchangeable. One is a mass noun (used without an article): "better oversight is needed"; while the other is a count noun (used with an article): "it was an oversight". So "because of oversight" sounds odd to me; I think it would be "because of an oversight", which would unambiguously indicate the "error" sense.
The contradictory meaning of "sanction" is very recent and dates to the 90s (referring to trade restrictions on Iraq). Because it's so new it really annoys me (as opposed to, say, cleave).
When I hear it I still hear as it was used: we (was it the UN? US? I can no longer remember) sanction your restricting trade with this other country. Which on TV was abbreviated/blurred and thus within only a couple of years the standalone term had acquired the new meaning!
So at least to me your sentence seems clear: I don't feel like the meaning has changed quite as much as you do. But since you interpret it that way: perhaps I am wrong!
It's a shame the google ngram tool only consults text. TV is a rich source of neologisms.
Older then that. I remember discussing the word and its opposed interpretations in my student days back in the seventies.
This was in Danish, but same word ('sanktion'), same meanings.
I guess the history of this auto-antonym is that in Latin, it refers to a decree or rule—which could potentially be a decree allowing something, or a decree forbidding something.
I was excited to look up and see what I had gotten wrong but I don't see it in that entry. It lists the "first uses" as being definition 1 of noun and verb, i.e. precisely my example (UN sanction on restriction of trade).
They do quote (the wonderful) Molly Ivins, who passed away in 2007.
I've heard Americans use biweekly to mean every two weeks. I've also seen them use it to mean twice a week, but more rarely than the other meaning.
In the UK and other English speaking areas (Australia and New Zealand to name two) bi-weekely always means twice a week, following the same pattern as biannually and other examples. We use fortnightly to mean every two weeks, but the word fortnight is not commonly used in the US.
Bimonthly is also ambiguous unfortunately. Again in the UK it would be taken as meaning twice per month (almost, but not quite, the same as fortnightly) but some others use it to mean every two months.
Biannually seems to be consistently used and understood to mean twice per year, with biennial meaning every two years though that isn't a commonly used word in my experience (people tend to just say "every two years").
One (relatively) common usage of biennial (or its Italian spelling biennale) is in the art and cinema community as competitions tend to happen every other year and are called a biennale even in English
You mean to say "semiannually", of course. As I've been told by many people for whom English is a second language, no one speaks English worse than the English. b^)
I don't think it is carelessness in this case. The prefix bi can have both meanings and ultimately it comes down to indeterminate parsing: (biweek)ly or bi(weekly), and thus can only be resolved by convention. But both usages have been long established (at least in the US) so we're stuck. This seems far different from the penultimate or literally or hysterical misuses that became a careless norm.
Semiweekly suffers from the same logical discrepancy, but unlike biweekly the convention is well established (though you hardly ever hear the term in the US. In fact before this thread I wouldn't have known which it meant. (other than definitely being the opposite of biweekly... so...))
I wish it was socially acceptable to reply with a compiler error when people use these words. Like "Ambiguous token in the current namespace." Maybe that makes me a nerd, on the spectrum, or just pedantic. Or a pedantic nerd on the spectrum.
Somewhat related: I wish human languages would have the concept of a parse error. Often enough someone says something to me that I'll hear with 100% clarity, but still have no clue what they are trying to say, after which it's often time to play the "what" game until they rephrase.
Very interesting. The article's "see also" references branch prediction. Given all the nascent security findings around cache security, it makes me wonder whether disfluency could be used to attack cognition, in interrogative techniques or subversive advertising, for instance.
There's another type of language ambiguity in some languages, where the way a word is used makes it unclear what is the object and what is the subject in that sentence. It happens e.g. in Polish sometimes. Can't think of a good example now, but I recall that in my more pedantic days, I used to write stuff like: "subject --verb--> object" or "object <--verb subject" to distinguish between the cases. Unfortunately, it didn't catch on.
"Dzieci lubią psy" could in principle mean either "Kids like dogs" or "Dogs like kids". In practice there's no ambiguity (at least in this example), because SVO is a much more natural order.
While on the topic of insufferable linguistic pedantry: I always cringe when people use that to introduce subordinate clauses instead of who when the subject refers to humans, but don’t say anything because the majority does not seem to be bothered by this. Example: “The coders that use sublime are great.”
P.S. I also like to use the word insufferable, picked it up from Pride and Prejudice, unfortunately doesn’t get the usage it deserves nowadays.
P.P.S Not many people use P.S. in their emails/posts either, would be a good habit to bring back.
From Oxford Dictionaries Online: "It is sometimes argued that, in relative clauses, that should be used for non-human references, while who should be used for human references: a house that overlooks the park but the woman who lives next door. In practice, while it is true to say that who is restricted to human references, the function of that is flexible. It has been used for human and non-human references since at least the 11th century, and is invaluable where both a person and a thing is being referred to, as in a person or thing that is believed to bring bad luck."
That one really needs to go away from the list; I refuse to accept "figuratively" as a valid definition for "literally", and will contradict / argue with / make fun of anyone who does so.
I sympathise, but for better or worse the OED reports that people have been using "literally" to mean "figuratively"* since at least 1769:
> 1769 F. Brooke *Hist. Emily Montague* IV. ccxvii. 83 "He is a fortunate man to be introduced to such a party of fine women at his arrival; it is literally to feed among the lilies."
> 1801 *Spirit of Farmers' Museum* 262 "He is, literally, made up of marechal powder, cravat, and bootees."
> 1825 J. Denniston *Legends Galloway* 99 "Lady Kirkclaugh, who, literally worn to a shadow, died of a broken heart."
> 1863 F. A. Kemble *Jrnl. Resid. Georgian Plantation* 105 "For the last four years..I literally coined money."
> 1876 ‘M. Twain’ *Adventures Tom Sawyer* ii. 20 "And when the middle of the afternoon came, from being a poor poverty-stricken boy in the morning, Tom was literally rolling in wealth."
[*] Or as they, put it, "Used to indicate that some (frequently conventional) metaphorical or hyperbolical expression is to be taken in the strongest admissible sense"
This style of argument is not persuasive. It can only tell us that people have been making an error since 1769 or something. It can't tell us that we should tolerate this error in well constructed writing. You're demonstrated nothing.
Language is a democracy. When people say thing like "My head literally exploded", they are voting for "literally" to be a meaningless intensifier. When I make fun of them, I'm voting for it to have the meaning, "This actually happened".
Think about which way you want the language to be, and then use your vote.
Exactly. The post I argued against didn't provide any information about base rates, so it was not the kind of argument from popularity that you're describing. A lot of people write English. You can always find someone who screws it up in some way or another. Pointing out these screwups is not an argument that the screwup consists of a consensus language change.
Democracy implies you both have equal votes and there is an outcome that can become the norm. They are using the word 'literally' in a way that imbues additional meaning (or arguably makes a new word) without seeking permission from society or community. You are using (mild, well-meant) social coercion to try to suppress that usage. I'd say it's more anarchy than democracy.
I don't think the intensifier is meaningless. It is meaningful because otherwise people wouldn't use it. It might be jarring to you, or the meaning not obvious, but an intensifier is by definition meaningful: it intensifies, after all :)
One may or may not like it, but that is language how literally works.
You may not like my swapping the definitions of those words, but that is language how literally works. Therefore, according to your logic, it is valid.
Language "rules" are errors given time. There isn't a static arbiter of what is correct and what is not, otherwise new words wouldn't be added to dictionaries.
Those examples don't use literally to mean "literally" (or "figuratively").
Its meaning in those is closer to "pretty much", "as good as", or "almost like". It's more of a metaphorical intensifier, but there's clearly a metaphor being implied.
If you took away "literally" in both cases, it would still be understood to be figurative. "Literally" isn't doing its job of meaning literally, but it isn't meaning figuratively.
I think the correct understanding is as hyperbolic use of the regular sense of literally.
If I say, "I walked miles around the store looking for you" or "I waited for you for days", we don't say "sometimes miles means hundreds of feet and sometimes days means a few minutes". We say people sometimes exaggerate.
In the same way, "Tom was rolling in wealth [so much so that it's almost as if he were literally rolling in wealth, but of course that interpretation is silly and I'm using hyperbole to exaggerate how rolling-in-wealth Tom was]".
I don't understand the distinction you're trying to draw here. Literally 100% of the time modern people use the word "literally" in a way that means "figuratively" it's to engage in hyperbole but it's also to explicitly mark that what follows is not to be taken literally.
As you say, you can engage in hyperbole without marking it.
The distinction is that you cannot substitute the word "figuratively" in these examples, because it does not mean "figuratively".
If I say "I figuratively am going to kill him", you're highlighting the figurativeness of the act. You're stressing that you're not actually going to kill him. The meaning of the sentence is "I'm going to kill him... but not really".
If I say "I'm going to kill him" or "I'm literally going to kill him", which mean basically the same thing, it's still implied to be metaphor. But what's being stressed here is the closeness to the metaphor becoming actually literal. The meaning of the sentence is "I'm SO angry with him that I'm ALMOST at the point of killing him".
It's subtle, but there's definitely a distinction. "Figuratively" is a dehyperbolization (it's not really gonna happen), "literally" is a hyperbolization (it is hyperbolically really close to happening).
It isn't really used to mean 'figuratively' though is it?
When someone says "I was so cross I literally exploded!" they are not explicitly pointing out that they didn't really explode, they're just using the word for some kind of emphasis.
But words have meaning, er, at least they used to. "I literally exploded" is not accurate, as they didn't actually explode. Maybe "I laterally exploded"? That word would work equally as well as it still makes no sense.
> Words have meanings, and the meaning of literally is also emphasis. Bad prescriptivism.
The insistence that simple emphasis is a valid use for "literally" -- and quoting M-W or the OED to support your case -- is just as prescriptive the insistence that it doesn't.
Language is socially constructed by the people using it; we all "vote" by using it, and by policing its use.
So let me ask you this: Do you want "literally" to be a meaningless emphasis word (and thus lose its ability to specify "this actually happened")? Or do you want "literally" to mean "I am not speaking figuratively, this thing actually happened"?
If you want the former, then I disagree with you, but sure, go ahead and use your "vote" to police people objecting to "literally" meaning "figuratively". But if you want the latter, then join me in insisting that it means "this actually happened".
> The insistence that simple emphasis is a valid use for "literally" -- and quoting M-W or the OED to support your case -- is just as prescriptive the insistence that it doesn't.
It's not prescriptivist because I'm describing the meaning it is currently ascribed to.
> Do you want "literally" to be a meaningless emphasis word (and thus lose its ability to specify "this actually happened")?
Yes? I use the language everyone else uses, not the Pure language that everyone decides is the only version in the world the second they enter their 20s.
Why are you dying on this hill? Why are you mad that people are deviating from your One True Ideal of what you think the language should be? It's not like there aren't other words that you can substitute in; it's whining for the sake of whining against language change. Not to mention, you're dying on the hill against a language change that already happened hundreds of years ago.
Sorta... "literally" may add emphasis to the figure of speech, a hyperbole, to make it even more hyperbolic. But in your example, "to explode" (according to Webster's) also means "to burst out in anger", so "literally" in this case would just serve to attest that the explosion of anger is accurate, which is the most essential definition of "literally" anyway.
A better, similar example could be "I was so ashamed I literally imploded". In this case "literally" is just emphasizing a figurative implosion.
> "literally" may add emphasis to the figure of speech
I think "emphasis" is really what this alternate usage is.
I had a weird experience when I rented the tux for my wedding. The tux came with a colored handkerchief that was meant to be tucked into the pocket of the coat in a decorative way; and the guy showing me how to do it kept using "literally": "Literally take the handercheif, and literally fold it over so, and literally put it in the pocket so."
I was a bit bemused, but I didn't say anything, because he was literally taking the handkerchief, folding it over, and so on. But it seemed a bit strange to use it that way; I would certainly never have interpreted him as saying to metaphorically fold the handkerchief, so why emphasize "literally"?
I posted the experience to FB, and someone pointed out that he was simply using the word "literally" for emphasis: in this case, emphasizing how simple the steps were.
When people say things like "My head literally exploded", they're doing the same thing: simply using it as an intensifier.
Very cool list. I little sad the word "peruse" mean to read over in an attentive or leisurely manner is not on the list it's one of my favorite autoantonyms.
A lot of these are just words describing two-subject events. When there is a lease, someone is lending and someone is borrowing. Same for rent, bill, left, etc.
A lot of the others are present vs. past tense. After you put something where you want it, you want it to stay put.
236 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 272 ms ] threadAnd the inclusion of literally made me smile
For example, clip = to fasten originates from Old English `clyppan` (to embrace/clasp/surround), while clip = to cut originates somewhere Scandanavian, as in Old Norse' `klippa` (to clip/shear). Are those still homographs? I think a fair number of the list items are the result of convergent evolution.
Etymology is relevant to whether two words are cognates.
[1] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/heteronym
[2] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/resign
Still think this list would help every struggling learner of English.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/literally
You may be interested in linguistic descriptivism, as opposed to linguistic prescriptivism:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_description
We can be descriptive in saying that people use "literally" when they don't mean "literally" - we can also be descriptive when we label such people as ignorant of the meaning of the words they use.
Because that would be the worst. No one ever says something while meaning something else.
When, while sitting at the table, people ask me if I can pass them the water, I check if I can reach the bottle, I check if I'm close enough to them, then I say "yes, I can" and keep eating.
It seems like the Spanish and Portuguese could be literally taken as "what are hours?" ("intervals of sixty minutes!") (although I don't think it would be the most idiomatic way to ask that question in either language), while one German option is "how late is it?" ("not very!").
There's another German question which could be taken as "how much clock is it?", but since clocks are usually discrete objects, it might be quite a strain to try to take this as a question about something's clock-nature. (Maybe if you were looking at Dalí's Persistence of Memory, you could answer something like "this one is not very much clock".)
That position is normally termed prescriptivism, and AFAIK it's widely rejected by lexicographers and linguists and whatnot.
So are you prescribing to me that I must accept "figuratively" as a valid definition for "literally"?
My take is that language is a democratic activity. I never voted for the people who decided "they" must always be plural, and could never stand-in for a third-person singular of unknown gender. I think that use is simple, sensible, and solves a genuine problem in the language; every time I use "they" in the third-person-singular, I "vote" for that to be an acceptable use case.
On the other hand, the only reason to use the word "literally" is to say that this thing actually happened. That is the meaning of the word. Using it to mean "figuratively" doesn't fix a missing hole in the language; on the contrary, it opens up a hole, because low you don't know if the thing actually happened, or if the guy is just using the word "literally" to mean the opposite of "literally". If we just give up, and start saying "actually" instead of "literally", then eventually the same linguistic process will corrupt "actually", and all other variations, as well.
People who use the word "literally" as an intensifier are casting their vote for how to use the language. When I make fun of those people, I'm casting my vote, that I don't like their usage. I will continue to do so, and argue with anyone who disagrees with me, as long as it's practical to do so.
No, they are describing the fact that it is used that way, whether you like it or not.
That said, while I totally accept the usage, and don't have a problem with people saying "I literally died laughing" (because the phrase "I died laughing" is already on the face of it a statement of fact, and yet we have no problem understanding that it's figurative, so any modifiers -- I seriously died laughing, I totally died laughing -- are just intensifying the hyperbole), I personally don't think it should have been added to the dictionary.
People already use intensifiers when being hyperbolic (as above, "I seriously died laughing," "I totally died laughing"), we don't need to add to the definition of all of them. It's a valid part of the constellation of "intensifier + idiom," and each intensifier doesn't need to be singled out.
I think saying "I died laughing" is a fine idiom. But the continual slipping into "cranking up the volume", and having more and more words mean nothing, is bad for the language. So, I vote to oppose this.
You have a vote too. Think about the way you want the language to be, and then vote by using it that way, and / or arguing with people who use it the way you don't like.
Do you know Captain Literally?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9jh4Mpgbi4A
As I said elsewhere, when someone says "I've been waiting for days" and it's actually been minutes, we don't say "days sometimes means minutes". We say they were exaggerating for effect. It's a different use of the same meaning.
I think it's the same for "literally". Hyperbolic use of the original meaning. If "literally" meant "figuratively" we would expect to see sentences that would be interpreted as literal but for the inclusion of "literally", and I don't think I have ever seen one.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/misuse-of-lite...
Include me among those who find it frustrating, but the meanings of words are more or less acquired by convention, and I think my side has been outvoted on this one.
Incidentally, I think one reason people get irritated by this is that some people prefer communication to be direct, unambiguous, and straightforward without relying on a lot of subtlety, context, guessing, or interpretation. I'd bet that programmers and other technically-minded people lean this direction more. So when people complain that this sort of thing is a violation of the rules, I think on some level they know that's not true, so I'm inclined to interpret it more like a plea or protest to avoid this style of indirect communication.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8fxy6ZaMOq8
- "I could care less" meaning "I couldn't care less"
- "Entrée" meaning a main dish rather than a starter
"I couldn't care less" is a much clearer reference to being at this state of absolute-uncaring.
Regardless, I think this is just a result of people getting lazy with their language... it is not meant to be said in this say, and is properly stated, "I couldn't care less". In the US (can't speak for elsewhere) people just repeat what they think others have said, to convey what they think they understood. This is the source of a lot of language rot.
Another one is the pattern “all X are not Y.” Vs “not all X are Y.”
> “I could care less” is a bastardization of couldn’t care less.
I've come to the conclusion that this bastardization came from the way "--dn't c--" feels in the mouth. Lots of consonant sounds in a row. Drop the "n't" and it feels much better to say, even though the phrase becomes nonsense. You even get a little bonus alliteration.
https://www.nytimes.com/1979/09/30/archives/on-language-twow...
https://www.grammarphobia.com/blog/2007/01/i-could-care-less...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=om7O0MFkmpw
If people do, what similar turns of phrase would they likewise mangle? "Well done son, I could be more proud", or "I'm completely thrilled, I could be happier", or "I'm at rock bottom, things could be worse".
"In Defense of I Could Care Less": https://slate.com/human-interest/2014/03/why-i-could-care-le...
> A number of language writers have suggested that “could care less” has a sarcastic reading, conveying something like “Ha! As if there were something in the world I could care less about.” There are some American Yiddish-inflected phrases that work this way, like “I should be so lucky!” (meaning “there’s no way I’m ever gonna be that lucky”) or “I should care!” (why should I care?). Even if “could care less” didn’t originate from a sarcastic intent, it matches up well enough with these other forms in the language to help give it staying power.
"Caring About Whether You Couldn’t Care Less": https://www.dictionary.com/e/could-care-less/
I particularly like this argument from this second link:
> The argument of logic falls apart when you consider the fact that both these phrases are idioms. In English, along with other languages, idioms aren’t required to follow logic, and to point out the lack of logic in one idiom and not all idioms is…illogical. Take the expression “head over heels,” which makes far less sense than “heels over head” when you think about the physics of a somersault. It turns out “heels over head” entered English around 1400, over 250 years before “head over heels,” however, the “logical” version of this idiom hasn’t been in popular usage since the late Victorian era.
In British English it means “disputable” while in American English it means “hypothetical”.
All of these have in common that they're more less the opposite of "something controversial or worth arguing about", which is the British English.
That is a meaning of "moot", but "hypothetical" is not. The word "another" was probably ill-advised there.
In Japanese 適当 is supposed to mean "appropriate, proper", but in practice it almost always means "unserious, sloppy, careless". Not sure how that came about.
Me: "I tried what you suggested and now everything's hunky-dory."
Them, 12 hours later: "Well if you're going to complain about my suggestion, I wish you'd have at least explained what was wrong with it.
It also means "partially". "It was quite nice", etc.
I think this comes from people using the phrase "It was quite good" in cases when they weren't hugely impressed.
These are far from hard & fast rules though. In spoken situations the intended meaning is generally obvious from tone, in written text it can be quite ambiguous.
There is at least one use where the word means both at once: when it is used on its own: Person one: "The man is an utter 'king imbecile", Person two: "Quite" or P1: "WOOOOOOHOOOOOOO!!!!!!", P2: "Quite". Here it means "I agree (on a binary yes/no level) but I wouldn't put it that strongly". Similar to how "indeed" is often used.
:trollface: it's definitely used both ways, but always clear from context I would say.
For example, consider "An original telling of the story" vs "The original telling of the story".
Original means the origin/birth in both examples, the difference lies not in the meaning of original but in the word it affects (The telling, or the story itself)
I love how that sentence yields 4 possible meanings.
When I hear it I still hear as it was used: we (was it the UN? US? I can no longer remember) sanction your restricting trade with this other country. Which on TV was abbreviated/blurred and thus within only a couple of years the standalone term had acquired the new meaning!
So at least to me your sentence seems clear: I don't feel like the meaning has changed quite as much as you do. But since you interpret it that way: perhaps I am wrong!
It's a shame the google ngram tool only consults text. TV is a rich source of neologisms.
They do quote (the wonderful) Molly Ivins, who passed away in 2007.
In the UK and other English speaking areas (Australia and New Zealand to name two) bi-weekely always means twice a week, following the same pattern as biannually and other examples. We use fortnightly to mean every two weeks, but the word fortnight is not commonly used in the US.
Bimonthly is also ambiguous unfortunately. Again in the UK it would be taken as meaning twice per month (almost, but not quite, the same as fortnightly) but some others use it to mean every two months.
Biannually seems to be consistently used and understood to mean twice per year, with biennial meaning every two years though that isn't a commonly used word in my experience (people tend to just say "every two years").
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biennale
https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/on-biweekly-an...
Biweekly and bimonthly can mean the same thing because of the prefix bi-, which here can mean “occurring every two” or “occurring twice in.”
Semiweekly suffers from the same logical discrepancy, but unlike biweekly the convention is well established (though you hardly ever hear the term in the US. In fact before this thread I wouldn't have known which it meant. (other than definitely being the opposite of biweekly... so...))
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/08/31/illusion/
I think the takeaway here is that compiler errors could use more specificity and grammar checks too...
Now I'm cool!
P.S. I also like to use the word insufferable, picked it up from Pride and Prejudice, unfortunately doesn’t get the usage it deserves nowadays.
P.P.S Not many people use P.S. in their emails/posts either, would be a good habit to bring back.
(Sorry if I'm being insufferable :-)
Some years ago, while skimming The DFW Reader (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/21423291-the-david-foste...), I saw the fact he included the exclusivity of who to humans on his list of good practices for students in the class he taught.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amelia_Bedelia
Think about which way you want the language to be, and then use your vote.
You may not like my swapping the definitions of those words, but that is language how literally works. Therefore, according to your logic, it is valid.
The 'well constructed writing' portion was not specified. What was specified is that someone will make fun of anyone for the colloquial use case.
Its meaning in those is closer to "pretty much", "as good as", or "almost like". It's more of a metaphorical intensifier, but there's clearly a metaphor being implied.
They look the same to me.
"Literally" is being used for hyperbole. It makes the sentence more intense.
The word "figuratively" is not used for hyperbole. It's not a synonym. The sentence being figurative does not matter.
I think the correct understanding is as hyperbolic use of the regular sense of literally.
If I say, "I walked miles around the store looking for you" or "I waited for you for days", we don't say "sometimes miles means hundreds of feet and sometimes days means a few minutes". We say people sometimes exaggerate.
In the same way, "Tom was rolling in wealth [so much so that it's almost as if he were literally rolling in wealth, but of course that interpretation is silly and I'm using hyperbole to exaggerate how rolling-in-wealth Tom was]".
As you say, you can engage in hyperbole without marking it.
If I say "I figuratively am going to kill him", you're highlighting the figurativeness of the act. You're stressing that you're not actually going to kill him. The meaning of the sentence is "I'm going to kill him... but not really".
If I say "I'm going to kill him" or "I'm literally going to kill him", which mean basically the same thing, it's still implied to be metaphor. But what's being stressed here is the closeness to the metaphor becoming actually literal. The meaning of the sentence is "I'm SO angry with him that I'm ALMOST at the point of killing him".
It's subtle, but there's definitely a distinction. "Figuratively" is a dehyperbolization (it's not really gonna happen), "literally" is a hyperbolization (it is hyperbolically really close to happening).
That's not a definition of "figuratively".
When someone says "I was so cross I literally exploded!" they are not explicitly pointing out that they didn't really explode, they're just using the word for some kind of emphasis.
The insistence that simple emphasis is a valid use for "literally" -- and quoting M-W or the OED to support your case -- is just as prescriptive the insistence that it doesn't.
Language is socially constructed by the people using it; we all "vote" by using it, and by policing its use.
So let me ask you this: Do you want "literally" to be a meaningless emphasis word (and thus lose its ability to specify "this actually happened")? Or do you want "literally" to mean "I am not speaking figuratively, this thing actually happened"?
If you want the former, then I disagree with you, but sure, go ahead and use your "vote" to police people objecting to "literally" meaning "figuratively". But if you want the latter, then join me in insisting that it means "this actually happened".
> The insistence that simple emphasis is a valid use for "literally" -- and quoting M-W or the OED to support your case -- is just as prescriptive the insistence that it doesn't.
It's not prescriptivist because I'm describing the meaning it is currently ascribed to.
> Do you want "literally" to be a meaningless emphasis word (and thus lose its ability to specify "this actually happened")?
Yes? I use the language everyone else uses, not the Pure language that everyone decides is the only version in the world the second they enter their 20s.
Why are you dying on this hill? Why are you mad that people are deviating from your One True Ideal of what you think the language should be? It's not like there aren't other words that you can substitute in; it's whining for the sake of whining against language change. Not to mention, you're dying on the hill against a language change that already happened hundreds of years ago.
A better, similar example could be "I was so ashamed I literally imploded". In this case "literally" is just emphasizing a figurative implosion.
I think "emphasis" is really what this alternate usage is.
I had a weird experience when I rented the tux for my wedding. The tux came with a colored handkerchief that was meant to be tucked into the pocket of the coat in a decorative way; and the guy showing me how to do it kept using "literally": "Literally take the handercheif, and literally fold it over so, and literally put it in the pocket so."
I was a bit bemused, but I didn't say anything, because he was literally taking the handkerchief, folding it over, and so on. But it seemed a bit strange to use it that way; I would certainly never have interpreted him as saying to metaphorically fold the handkerchief, so why emphasize "literally"?
I posted the experience to FB, and someone pointed out that he was simply using the word "literally" for emphasis: in this case, emphasizing how simple the steps were.
When people say things like "My head literally exploded", they're doing the same thing: simply using it as an intensifier.
And another one, for 'gwd downthread: https://xkcd.com/1108/.
A lot of the others are present vs. past tense. After you put something where you want it, you want it to stay put.