s/literally/directly/
The word “literally” has no synonyms and if it dies it will leave a massive lexical gap.
The word “literally” has no synonyms and if it dies it will leave a massive lexical gap.
That doesn't necessarily mean we're moving in the wrong direction. Language evolves to satisfy speakers' criteria, so it will gradually improve median utility. But any change is going to have cost, and confusion could be the price we pay for progress.
Alternately, you can imagine a situation where 1% of the population derives a huge amount of utility from a word, while 99% only get a small benefit from another definition. Improvements to the median in that scenario can have negative consequences in aggregate. Or you can see that this particular usage has been confusing people for a hundred years, and the cost of change may outweigh any potential benefit.
I think the position that natural language will just take care of itself is just a touch hand-wavey. Human interests and linguistic-evolutionary movement are often coaligned, but sometimes diverge- the same as with human interests and economic growth.
Why not? It's done just that for countless millenia. Cavemen without Ph.D.'s in linguistics managed to develop languages for communication just fine.
Now, they could be further optimized, sure. But the default of taking no conscious action at all has historically worked out just fine for linguistic evolution.
It is not my belief that, left to its own devices, natural language will become unusable. It is probably true that we can get away with letting nature run its course. I do object to using this as an argument for avoiding optimization, but I don't think I'm in disagreement with the parent there. Apologies for my error.
This is the underlying source of my distress: the fear that my ability to understand and be understood by people will remain as it is.
This specific change literally has had me pacing back and forth in distress before.
If this is what has you pacing in distress, I'm envious.
Well I’m also getting divorced, for reasons that aren’t entirely unrelated to literal communication.
Whatever word we have for "this is [truthfully] [adjective]", they're always going to use the word for "truthful" to give something added punch. Specifically in the sense of suggesting a quality has become so extreme that the metaphor is no longer an exaggeration.
Part of it is we humans just love metaphors come to life. Godzilla "literally" was taller than a skyscraper. Superman "literally" was stronger than a freight train. Tolkien was disappointed enough as a kid in Dunsinane forest "coming to life and walking" (by a bunch of men chopping off branches for camouflage, in MacBeth), that he wanted to do a story where the trees literally walked, without any metaphorical fine print.
As Dan Smith has pointed out in his reply to my comment on Mike Ruiz's answer, this usage crossed over into general acceptability quite a while ago, having been employed in works by Charles Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, William Makepeace Thackeray, James Joyce and Thomas Hardy, and so on. What might be happening is sort of a "resistance" against this meaning of literally, which people are starting to believe should mean something closer to what it originally did.
[1] https://www.quora.com/How-did-the-term-literally-come-to-mea...
Yes it does. The dictionaries have added the second figurative meaning:
Unclear if you meant some kind of irony by using "literal" here, but as a native English speaker I can assure you the second meaning ("used in an exaggerated way to emphasize a statement or description that is not literally true or possible") is frequently used.
Try a twitter search for something like "literally turn the world upside down": https://twitter.com/search?q=literally%20turn%20the%20world%...
Plenty of the people using it are native English speakers and (literally!) using the exact phrase in the dictionary in the way they describe.
To see this, remove the word "literally" from such a sentence. You are generally left with a statement that is still hyperbole or metaphor and not literally true. Which word are you going to redefine in a sentence like "It turned the world upside down." to enable you to interpret it literally? If you understand it as hyperbole, why does adding the word "literally" require any special meaning for that word?
Conversely, if you believe that the word "literally" literally can mean "not literally", in the same way that, say, "cleave" is an auto-antonym, it would authorize statements like
(*) When you use metaphor, you are speaking literally.
(*) What I said was the plain truth, but John took it literally.
Moreover, if you replace the word "literally" in a sentence like
"It literally turned the world upside down."
"It figuratively turned the world upside down."
I understand the desire of lexicographers to document this usage, which is as you say common (and legitimate) and seems to confuse people, but it's just not a different meaning of the word.
Literally is used to distinguish figurative speech from literal speech, while verbatim is used to distinguish exact wording from paraphrasing.
For example, if I had temporarily lost my voice and couldn't talk, and someone texted "want to call", if I replied "I can't talk right now", they would assume I meant I was busy, but if I replied "I literally can't talk right now", that would accurately convey that I was in situation where talking wasn't possible, not merely busy. "I verbatim can't talk right now" is nonsense.