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Comment by time_management | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

> "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?

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