According to the dictionary, “literally” now also means “figuratively”
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No need for the "hmph". It's how language works. Yes, a word can indeed have not only multiple meanings but also contrasting meanings. And there's nothing wrong with that nor is there a need to be judgmental about it.
It's not a particularly new meaning either
http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/002611.h...
I agree that there's no need to be judgmental about it. I wouldn't fault a particular person using "literally" this way. I disagree that there's nothing wrong with this kind of language drift.
While it's nobody's fault, it makes English poorer. There are already lots of general-purpose intensifiers. English doesn't particularly need another one. The previous formal definition of "literally" was comparatively specific and fulfilled a useful role neatly and succinctly. I can't think of another single word to fulfill this role in the future.
I feel similarly with the phrase "beg the question", which in common usage now means simply "raises the question" or "invites the question". It doesn't bother me because I think people who use it this way are stupid; it bothers me because there is no synonym for "begs the question" which is equally succinct.
Since the original sense of "begs the question" is inherently intransitive, and the modern sense is inherently transitive (and, further, the original sense can be rationalized as an intransitive version of the modern sense where the implied object is the proposition that the argument was attempting to justify), there is no conflict between the original and modern sense, so I don't see the problem.
Also, the original sense of "begs the question" can be equivalently stated as "is a circular argument" which is nearly as succinct and uses words in something much more like there usual English senses, so even if the more modern sense of "begs the question" could create semantic ambiguity (which it can't, since its syntactically distinct), I still wouldn't agree that much useful was lost.
I'm more than a little bothered by this line of reasoning. Spoken languages aren't like programming languages, where having many ways to express the same thing can be seen as a detriment. Having more ways for one to express oneself can only make the language richer.
In other words, "literally" meaning "figuratively" means it can no longer be unambiguously used to mean "not figuratively". The latter function is more useful than the former because there are lots of existing words for the former and only a few for the latter.
For anyone else missing the point "really" doesn't necessarily mean real, "truly" doesn't necessarily mean true, "actually" doesn't necessarily mean actual, they often just add intensity to what comes after them, just like "literally".
A quick way to improve your writing is to get in the habit of editing yourself and removing words like "really" or "truly" and either leaving them out or using a better phrasing to get across what you mean.
Contronym.
Edit: whoops, forgot to link to arbitrary example
http://www.ling.upenn.edu/courses/Fall_1998/ling001/prescrip...
There's no such debate at all, whoever told you that is not a linguist.
Linguistics is a science and it is inherently descriptive. It describes what it sees in natural language. It doesn't make judgment as to the worthiness or corectness of something. That's what laymen do, but they cannot reinforce their views through linguistics, only through distortion of linguistics.
One might go so far as to say that, because linguistics is a science, it is therefore descriptive.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Académie_française
[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zwischenstaatliche_Kommission_... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Council_for_German_Orthography
That may be, but such behavior contradicts their supposed status as scientists, i.e. dispassionate observers of nature. Imagine a scientist in the Australian outback, yelling at a Platypus, "You're doing it all wrong!"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platypus
> The idea to pass laws to change spelling may appear somewhat strange to others, though ...
One might as well try to stop evolution in its tracks.
a) definitely sucks, but b)?
English is very much expanding. Orwell's jackboot may be coming but it will be a literal boot not a lack of words.
Given our current course, the logical conclusion is for every word in the dictionary to be replaced with "fuck" -- we'll just repeat that one word over and over again relying on context to tell us which of the thousand meanings is the intended one.
"he's drunk" -> "fuck; Fucker's fucked"
"she needs to pay more taxes than expected" -> "Fucker's fucked. Fuckers!"
"they had sex" -> "fuckers fucked"
"the sex was amazing" -> "fucking fuck... fuck!"
This is all well and good for simplifying the writing of language, but when we reach the point of all words having overlapping and contrasting meanings and somebody writes "Fuck, fucking fuckedy fuck. Fuck?", what the fuck does that mean?
Another way of thinking of this is as a foreigner learning English for the first time. If you hear someone using the word "literally" and you don't know what it means, you will look it up in the dictionary and expect to find all the various possibly meanings.
People believe, and thusly treat, authorities as prescribers. As people who tell you what to do. That's not what an authority is. An authority is a heuristic. It's someone who has heard the question before and can answer it faster than reinventing the wheel.
That's what a dictionary is. Someone else went and surveyed all the uses of a word and documented it so that you don't have to do it yourself.
An authority is a search engine. Being authoritative is being a good search engine.
I think I'll have to be a snob and side against the masses and the "linguists" on that one. A lot depends on who you hang out with and read, I guess.
On the topic of correct grammar, s/media is/media are/
It's a difference in perception. I'd argue that even with a descriptivist language, you need three things to produce new words or meanings: widespread usage, widespread understanding, and a perception of correctness (or at least the absence of perception of incorrectness). "literally" has only one of those. That's the same reason that "their" doesn't grow new meanings for "they are" and "a location distinct from 'here'": that error is widespread, and mostly understood in context, but nigh-universally perceived as incorrect.
There isn't. At least not in any objectively recognisable way. You (and I mean you specifically) can obviously look at a new use and say "this is a new meaning" or "no, this is an error", but that's a subjective judgement and others would think otherwise. It is as impossible as being given a copy of a movie and being asked, by only inspecting the movie, to tell if this was copied from a legal DVD or downloaded from a torrent.
Just look at the verb "to troll (on an internet forum)". It comes from the practise of trolling in fishing, where you tie a bait to a cord and drive your boat around, drawing the bait through the water and waiting for some fish to take it. A lot of people, however, connect it with the race Troll, thinking of it as the practise of a big, nasty creature coming out from under and bothering people. That's not helped by calling the people who do it "trolls". Was the original, fishing term wrong? Was the person who coined the name Troll for a race of fantasy creatures wrong? Were the people who connected trolling with Trolls and subsequently called trolls "trolls" wrong? For bonus points: if two words are written the same and pronounced the same, can they be different words, or are all their meanings different meanings of the same word?
Hence me talking about "widespread". If the consensus of the vast majority of people says that a usage is incorrect, then a helpful dictionary should properly document that that usage will be perceived as incorrect. Writing "there" when you mean "their" or "they're" usually produces a sentence that can be understood in context (our language parsers are remarkably resilient), but will make the writer look like they either don't know or don't care, and will create a strong negative impression in those who read it.
Dictionaries should document widespread usages, even incorrect ones. Dictionaries often attach information to meanings like "archaic" or "frequently misused as" or "frequently confused with".
For example, a dictionary can and should add a note to "their" saying "frequently confused with they're and there". There's absolutely nothing wrong with that. But as long as the vast majority of people consider sentences like "there sentence structure needed some work" incorrect, a dictionary should not claim that "there" is a possessive pronoun without attaching the caveat that anyone reading it will consider it incorrect.
(This response applies to several replies.)
"Does not become right"? Translation: "I'm all for prescriptivist language."
> and a perception of correctness (or at least the absence of perception of incorrectness).
Seconded.
In language, there's no "right", there's only how people choose to use words.
> but nigh-universally perceived as incorrect.
Not by linguists.
> Seconded.
> In language, there's no "right", there's only how people choose to use words.
There is indeed a "right"; it's defined by the consensus of how people choose to perceive the speech and writings of others. If the vast majority of people consider something an error and a sign of a poor speaker/writer, that's something the speaker or writer should take into account, and it's something a dictionary should document: "if you use this you'll be perceived as incorrect".
No, that's false. The sole purpose of language is to communicate, and that only requires two people. If two very intelligent youngsters create their own private language, and if the language produces communication, how can that not be called a legitimate use of language?
You're speaking as though everyone should agree on the meaning of words, and the greater the level of agreement, the more legitimate the language. If that were true, there would be one language, not thousands, and something modeled on the French Academy would be in charge. But that's fiction, not reality.
> and it's something a dictionary should document: "if you use this you'll be perceived as incorrect".
Dream on. Lexicographers take note of word usage. When a word is used in a consistent way in ten recognized publications, that word and/or that meaning becomes official, and is entered into dictionaries. There is no "correct", there is only how people choose to use words. More here:
It's an entirely legitimate use of languages, and both speakers of that language can understand each other. Doesn't mean those two speakers won't disagree on the meanings of certain words. Add a third speaker and the language will develop more nuances.
Yes, language exists to communicate. Like it or not, some attempts at communication will be perceived as correct, and some will not. Assuming you speak or write in an attempt to communicate, and not just to hear yourself talk, you need to care about that perception.
You talk about communication between two people; that's already sufficient to raise this issue. One person may speak or write, and the other person may hear or read, and while the second person's very flexible parsers may correctly interpret meaning, those same parsers will also generate signals like "this person seems quite intelligent" or "this person writes like a lazy teenager on a cell phone". Useful language guides will tell you not just the meanings of words, but also how those words will be perceived by your audience.
When I referred to "consensus", I simply meant this kind of information about perception, scaled up to the entire population of speakers of a language, and made statistical. There's a fuzzy scale from "wrong" to "colloquial" to "dialect" to "variation" to unqualified "correct".
A dictionary that said "there" is a possessive pronoun also written as "their", without commenting on correct and incorrect usage, would not be nearly as useful as a dictionary that does.
"Correct" is not the operative term. The only criterion is whether the speaker achieves his objective. If he intends to communicate clearly, that's one criterion. If he intends to bamboozle his listener(s), that's another.
The is no "correct" in language, any more than there is in evolution. And natural evolution is the closest parallel to language.
Take the word "sheriff" as an example. Am I right to say "sheriff", with that spelling and pronunciation, to mean the primary legal authority in a U.S. county? Perhaps. Am I right to say "scirgerefa", and then later, "shire reeve", meaning an officer of the king responsible for maintaining order in each shire, collecting taxes and so forth? Yes again. What's the difference? Time.
http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=sheriff
How about "decimated"? Does it mean substantially destroyed, or does it mean reduced by a tenth? That depends ... on time and place.
If you wanted to make language "correct", to meet an arbitrary standard, you would have to fight against the natural evolution of language. Lexicographers don't want to do that, and speakers don't either. Why would you?
At some point it stopped being universally perceived as wrong, and people just grew used to it. Should we still try to correct the wrong common usage?
If you want to describe that specific fallacy in some way, there's a lovely phrase for that which already exists, describes the fallacy better, and uses fewer words - "petitio principii".
"Beg the question" used in this sense strikes me as redundant, inaccurate as a translation and a description, clunky, and pointlessly confusing. I hope its misuse is not actively fought, and that people who wish to describe the fallacy find a better way of doing so.
Even better, it is impossible to confuse with the "proper" usage (because it is distinct syntactically) and makes the "proper" usage more transparent and easier to understand.
The everyday form is transitive, its always "<foo> raises the question <bar>" and means "Accepting <foo> creates the need for a resolution of the issue <bar>".
The "proper" form is intransitive, its always simply "<foo> raises the question", meaning "<foo> invokes the petitio principii fallacy". This can be rephrased, however, as "<foo> creates the need for a resolution of the issue <bar>" where <bar> is the proposition argument <foo> was offered to justify, as it is stating that the argument depends on the conclusion it was offered to support.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondegreen
Actually, reading the article, it seems to make the distinction that those would be malapropisms instead:
Literally.
Nice examples. I also regularly see "reigning in" when "reining in" is what's meant. Reigning is what a monarch does to a kingdom, reining is what a cowboy does to a horse.
A related pet peeve is the ghastly aberration of saying "I could care less" to express the exact opposite. Is there some kind of sneaking Orwellism going on, where black becomes white and good is evil? Is it to do with the fact that TV has replaced the written word, and the Internet lets the illiterate publish to vast audiences without the benefit of a competent editor?
I am (literally) literally enraged about this.
The addition of this "figuratively" meaning to "literally" doesn't represent and endorsement of it. The dictionary is being descriptive of what is out there.
At the same time the statement "it’s okay to use literally to mean figuratively" seems to indicate that the author sees the dictionary as being prescriptive; that its appearance in the dictionary, ipso facto, "legitimizes" it.
The bottom line is: you still sound like an idiot using it in that way. Its description in the dictionary is not prescriptive of its usage.
The figurative meaning of "literally" isn't "figuratively", its an intensifier for a situation in which the fact that the usage of the modified word is figurative is already clear from context.
It's one thing to define a word, another thing to re-define a word to correct the speaker's intentions. Unless the definition includes a /sarc tag, then it's totally cool.
http://arachnoid.com/wrong/#Dictionary
Now it's suddenly "big news".