I shouldn't follow social media discussions about language usage, because the chance of insightful commentary is ... small. But even knowing this, I did follow a thread in which people were complaining about the figurative use of the word literally, as in something like "I literally died laughing".
A couple of sample cites from that thread:
This is the one change of usage I find most distressing. "Literally" is a word we previously used to clarify whether someone was using a word literally or figuratively. However, now we end up in an infinite regress: "did you use literally to mean literally or figuratively?".... "I meant literally".... "and by that do you mean figuratively?"... "I mean literally".... "and by that do you mean figuratively?" etc etc
language should (and does) evolve. But when a word shifts from a specific and precise meaning to an ambiguous, inexact or contrary meaning, we have not improved our ability to understand each other.
Apparently some people don't know that the "figurative" sense is listed as a second meaning in many dictionaries, including Merriam-Webster, American Heritage, Oxford Learner's, Collins, and Cambridge. In fact, I'd be surprised to find a contemporary dictionary that doesn't include this sense. When I noted that M-W has this entry, one guy argued "not the OED and therefore not definitive".[1] But sad for him, it's also in the OED (paywall):
Some people don't know that this usage goes back centuries. As you can see from the OED listing, the first cite for this "figurative" meaning goes back to 1769 and has had a healthy history since then. So this usage is not an example of the youths of today ruining the language or a failure of today's education system or whoever (whatever) the usual suspects are when folks decry the sad state of the world.
And some folks don't realize that this is another example of selective outrage, so to speak. As the commenters' opinions suggest, some people claim that the figurative use of literally is confusing, maybe even illogical. But I haven't seen any complaints (?) about usages like the following:
That would be awfully nice of you.
The lecture was terribly boring.
That video looks really fake.
That house is pretty ugly.
These are all examples where the adverbs — awfully, terribly, really, pretty — would be "confusing" if interpreted literally. But they're not being used in their literal senses — here, they're just qualifiers. Basically, these adverbs are variations on very. (Pretty is more like "somewhat".)
The figurative use of literally is along those lines: it qualifies what follows to suggest that it's exaggerated ("I was literally dying of laughter") or surprising ("There are literally hundreds of ways to make this classic soup").
All this being true, I don't think that the claim that literally is literally ambiguous holds up. But if people have examples (with context) where a figurative literally is ambiguous, I'd be interested to see them.
__________
|
