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Comment by tty | Hacker News Reader

>So it’s okay to use literally to mean figuratively as long as you really, really, really need to do so? Hmph.

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...

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>And there's nothing wrong with that nor is there a need to be judgmental about it.

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.

>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.

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 a vacuum, having another intensifier is a good thing even if it's very similar to existing intensifiers. My point was that getting another marginally useful intensifier at the expensive of a very useful clarifier makes the language less net poorer.

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.

> 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.

Gosh, did they really use really (3 times) in a sentence about the meaning of literally and not see the irony?

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".

Really is usually a no-op word. It's almost like "uh", it can really be added to sentences really almost anywhere without really changing anything or really improving anything. Really.

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.

I encountered an interesting example of two constrasting meanings of "outstanding" in the final section of the final report of a multi-million pound research project - it ended with a bullet point list of the "oustanding" areas for the project with the intention of meaning "not settled or resolved" when in context it looked like it meant "Standing out among others of its kind; prominent.".

But these two outstandings are just different, no? Not contrasting in the sense made salient by the present discussion.

In the context of that project final report they were meant to mean "the things we haven't done" but it looked like it meant "the best things we have done".

Right, I see what you mean.

There's even a word for it.

Contronym.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auto-antonym

Actually, not everyone agrees that that's how it works...whether society should value descriptive over prescriptive policies on its language is a huge debate among linguists. Just as programmers continue to argue over OOP vs functional, JavaScript vs CoffeeScript, etc

Edit: whoops, forgot to link to arbitrary example

http://www.ling.upenn.edu/courses/Fall_1998/ling001/prescrip...

>whether society should value descriptive over prescriptive policies on its language is a huge debate among linguists

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.

> Linguistics is a science and it is inherently descriptive.

One might go so far as to say that, because linguistics is a science, it is therefore descriptive.

However, there are linguists working in institutions that do prescribe the proper use of language – e.g. [0] in France and [1] in Austria, Switzerland and Germany. The idea to pass laws to change spelling may appear somewhat strange to others, though…

[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

> However, there are linguists working in institutions that do prescribe the proper use of language ...

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.

I think the takeaway here is that the literal meaning of "literally" is useless. If you are having a dialogue, you'd just tell people you were not speaking hyperbole, you mean exactly what you say. If you're writing, you're using the literal meaning of words anyway.

In general I'd agree. But in this case we see the sort of destruction of language George Orwell warned about. By legitimising a use of the word "literally" which is counter both to its etymology, and to the intention of talking about communication in terms of the specific meanings of the words involved, we risk making it more difficult in practice to consider the specifics of what has been said.

Unfortunately, this destruction of language is not government-mandated, as Orwell feared, but results a) from the laziness of most people and b) from the increased effects these people have on ‘upper class’ language due to thinner class boundaries and modern media.

a) definitely sucks, but b)?

for every "literally" we lose we gain a "twerk" AND a "jeggings" AND we steal (and give our own connotations to) a "kawaii"

English is very much expanding. Orwell's jackboot may be coming but it will be a literal boot not a lack of words.

> a word can indeed have not only multiple meanings but also contrasting meanings. And there's nothing wrong with that

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?

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