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Comment by hugh3 | Hacker News Reader

My younger son (20) almost literally eats advanced math books for breakfast.

I'm not sure I understand what it means to almost-literally eat advanced maths books for breakfast.

I understand what it means to do it figuratively, and I understand what it means to do it literally, but I'm afraid that almost-literally has me puzzled.

edit: Wow, modded down to -4 for linguistic pedantry? That's unusual.

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Hugh, he attacks the books with such vigor that they are sometimes almost destroyed in the process. Perhaps I was exaggerating a bit, but not by much!

The definition of literally has changed over time. Now a commonly accepted definition is: "used for emphasis: used with figurative expressions to add emphasis"

So "literally" is one of the few words that keeps its traditional meaning and means the opposite as well (like "bad" :-))

I'm not sure where the dividing line is between "has changed its meaning" and "is commonly misused", but I'm pretty sure that "literally" is still on the commonly-misused side of things.

Very few words come to mean their exact opposites via misuse. (I am assured that "bad" meant "good" in some brief period of the 80s in which I was too young to know the cool slang, but it wasn't because people were confused about which meant which.)

From American Heritage below. They seem to indicate that this has been "misused" for a long time. I use ding people for this, but now I think its overly pedantic, and now I think I'm technically wrong to even ding them.

"Usage Note: For more than a hundred years, critics have remarked on the incoherency of using literally in a way that suggests the exact opposite of its primary sense of "in a manner that accords with the literal sense of the words." In 1926, for example, H.W. Fowler cited the example "The 300,000 Unionists will be literally thrown to the wolves." The practice does not stem from a change in the meaning of literally itself -- if it did, the word would long since have come to mean "virtually" or "figuratively", but from a natural tendency to use the word as a general intensive, as in They had literally no help from the government on the project, where no contrast with the figurative sense of the words is intended."

It's an auto-antonym, a word that has two opposite meanings.

Wikipedia used to have a good list of them, but it looks like they just deleted it. Thank god for revision history: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=List_of_auto-anton...

I'm going to start using autoantonyms in completely ambiguous ways in email. I love it!

As an editor I'd correct it if it was in a very formal context but it's a perfectly acceptable colloquial usage for casual communication including emails and online forums.

Language is living, breathing and constantly changing. Words mean what people intend them and understand them to mean, not necessarily what they mean ... uh ... literally.

So some people don't use "literally" literally anymore.

I think the real fail of this thread is that the actual substance of the comment was lost amidst a pedantry pissing contest.

...the real failure...

Sorry.

Literally no one uses "literally" literally anymore.

> a commonly accepted definition [of 'literally'] ...

Really? If so, that's worse than "impact" used as a verb, or some of my relatives' apparent belief that certain prepositions no longer take objects ("we're going to the movies; ya wanna come with?")

[/old-fart-mode]

Funny, in German the literal translation "Willst Du mitkommen?" is perfectly fine ("mit" means "with").

But we do not normally strand our preposition (i.e. put them at the end of a sentence).

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