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I literally hate it

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A language maven tackles the use of "literally." I confess, I love this kind of article.

My pet peeve usage: "allegedly", for convicted criminals. After the trial there is no more allegation; they've been convicted. Their participation in the crime is legally a fact.

Unless or until overturned on appeal.

I'm going to allege that this is used by the press to avoid libel suits.

Not in the US. Libel is severely restricted esp. against the press. Successful suits are extremely rare. "Allegedly" was thrown in to prevent the defense in a trial from successfully raising the issue that the media biased the jury pool against the defendant.

I feel like "allegedly" is one of those euphemisms that swung full circle and became a dysphemism. If you allegedly did something, it's really bad.

I think the saddest case of the euphemism 180 is the word "lady". In the word's true sense, it's a huge compliment for a woman to be called a "lady", but it has been cheapened by the (originally ironic or euphemistic) diminutive and insulting uses ("bag lady", "dragon lady", "cleaning lady").

It's called the "euphemism treadmill".

Or the "sliding of the signified under the signifier" if you lean toward semiotics.

Legally a fact doesn't mean actually a fact. I can name a few people who legally killed someone and then it turns out they didn't.

But if its your pet peeve, you should read the New York Post, where they drop the "allegedly" and go right to calling them "scum" "perps," "villains," and "thugs." :)

The NYPost isn't exactly a bastion of journalistic integrity and award-winning reporting.

The title edit here ("I literally hate it") means literally the opposite of what the article says.

Because of that, I almost didn't bother reading it. Language peeves are not only tiresome, they're ignorant. Every correct usage started out as an incorrect usage.

On reading the first sentence, I noticed the author is a dictionary editor and wondered why on earth he would be making a mistake of this order.

Then I read the rest and realized that he's actually defending this use of "literally" to the peevers, showing that it (not surprisingly) turns out to have a long and distinguished history. In fact, the whole piece is a gentle smackdown of what he calls "usage criticism".

Great article, bad title edit.

What "literally" does is turn off the automatic evaluation of (stale) metaphors, thereby drawing attention to the metaphor itself.

And although it has been overused tremendously, this is a very useful feature to have in a language (just like being able to say "hopefully she'll come" is a useful feature to have).

Another way of explaining it is that "literally" should not be understood as "what follows is not a metaphor" but instead as "what follows is not a stale metaphor".

This is not a criticism of the article, which is actually very balanced, but I get very impatient with people who attempt to proscribe perfectly legitimate usage. "Literally" can be used as an intensifier, regardless of the truth of the statement it intensifies. People have been doing it for a long time. You can avoid it in your own writing if you hate it.

The article's point (in my reading anyway) is that "literally" sounds a bit silly when used to intensify a clichéed or fantastic statement. I'd say that's true. Of course, that means that "literally" can have the opposite effect than the one intended. Instead of intensifying your statement it can, by making it sound funny, unintentionally defuse it instead. Oh, the irony.

I love the English language.

> People have been doing it for a long time.

Why is it that commonplace misuse of a word justifies the misuse? Should we get rid of "they're" and "their" and simply use "there" in all circumstances since it has become so common?

> Why is it that commonplace misuse of a word justifies the misuse?

Because language is a tool for communication.

Your example is of misspellings, which are incorrect. But the use of "literally" as an intensifier is common usage and can't be called incorrect. Languages evolve, and the meanings of words can change as they are used by their speakers and writers. That's how it works.

... this. And the misuse of "irony" which is slowly beginning to mean anything remotely humorous.

Don't you mean "allegedly humourous"?

At this point it seems to mean everything which is a coincidence and occasionally, perhaps by accident, events which actually are ironic.

People like these dictionary editors have an interesting place in the evolution of language. They contribute to the stability of the language, which allows us to communicate more effectively by enforcing clarity and precision, but at the same time, the ideals they champion cannot survive longer than a few generations. Something like a "defender of punctuated equilibrium," which is actually not equilibrium.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_drift

My favourite example of this type of abuse comes from Radio Australia: "To see a 70 year old woman, literally glued to her television..."

I like how he pointed to "really" as an example of a usage resembling "literally" that is objected to much less often.

Huge pet peeve. I think less of a person when they use "literally" improperly.

Why can't they just say: I mean her hair was _figuratively_ on fire!

> I think less of a person when they use "literally" improperly.

I catch myself thinking like that sometimes and I think it's a mistake.

I think the whole point of the article was that the figurative usage of the word isn't a sign of mental deficiency.

Huge pet peeve. I think less of a person when the perfectly legitimate use of 'literally' is a pet peeve of theirs.

If you read the article you would understand how there's nothing improper about the usage. If you knew anything about human language you'd know that there's no such thing as an improper usage. Sheidlower is a highly respected lexicographer and his entire article subtly acknowledges this fact. The speech community uses the word in a certain way, and all who hear it understand what is being said, without even consciously realizing it. There is nothing improper or wrong about how it is being used. The amazing richness of language is due in part exactly to the kind of mechanisms that cause drift such as seen with 'literally', and it's a testament to the endless versatility of the language mechanism. On the surface at which the average person contemplates it, sitting around in their armchair, language is not a rigid, logical artifice that makes the sort of naive sense they want it to.

Read Pinker's 'The Language Instinct' for a good discussion of the topic of language mavens. My pet peeve is people like you, who have pet peeves that are grounded in your own ignorance.

I tend to agree, but nevertheless this particular usage does bother me. There's no concise way to express the idea that something really, truly, actually, physically happened as clearly as the word "literally" can. And yet we just toss it in with the ever increasing batch of redundant superlatives needed to satisfy our desire for dramatic grandeur.

> If you knew anything about human language... > My pet peeve is people like you...

Wow, that was kind of mean. I understand that you have an opinion about this topic but I don't think that's a legitimate reason to be insulting.

Accept my apologies -- I honestly didn't intend that reply to come across as mean-spirited, but I guess it did. I just feel like judging a person just because they use a particular turn of phrase is kind of awful, especially when, as the article explains, they are actually using the phrase in a highly subtle and expressive way, which the entire speech community implicitly agrees on (and has agreed on for hundreds of years, in this case).

I don't see how it's any more insulting for me to say that my pet peeve is people like you than it is for you to say that your pet peeve is people who say 'literally'. In any event I'm not proclaiming you ignorant as an insult or name-calling -- I'm simply stating that I believe it's ignorant to think less of a person because you don't think their usage makes 'logical' sense. Language is a locus of communicative intent and its purpose is being achieved marvelously by this usage: otherwise people would not be using it.

Misuse of "proverbial(ly)" is just as prevalent but doesn't get nearly as much attention as "literally".

This (ab)use of literally doesn't mean its opposite, "figuratively". It's a sloppy shorthand for "without exaggeration".

"Without exaggeration, I got my ass kicked on the exam." = Right. "I literally got my ass kicked on the exam." = Wrong.

> "I literally got my ass kicked on the exam." = Wrong.

Usually. I'm sure conditions exist where such a statement evaluates to true.

There are idiomatic phrases like that. For example, I wouldn't consider it wrong to say "I literally fucked that exam up" because "to fuck up" is a vulgar idiom for "to botch" and usually has nothing to do with literal sex (not that sex can't be fucked up). So it translates to "I literally botched that exam", which is not an abuse of "literally".

I disagree. To me, the literal meaning of "fuck" is "to have sex." I see the qualifier literaly as meaning "the next phrase is being used in its original sense, not its figurative sense."

I see it similar to using \ in regular expressions. In the regular expression "\.", the \ acts much as the word literally, and modifies the special character so that I get the literal/actual meaning as opposed to the figurative/special meaning.

As for your example, I think it's meaningless. The phrase "fuck up" is a figure of speech, and has no literal meaning. It just has a meaning.

Maybe kickboxing exams?

That example reminds me of a fellow employee I worked with once who combined this abuse with a classic Australian idiom. He meant to say "I'm very tired".

He said: "I'm literally buggered".

Took me 10 minutes to stop laughing and get up off the floor.

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