A lot of people, not just Keaven, get worked up about this one. Curiously, no one gets their panties in a wad when they hear the word “really” predicating something fictional.
A: “Godzilla was really big.”
B: “What did you say? Are you implying that Godzilla was real?”
In fact, English has a history of veracity-related words being pressed into service as general intensifiers. Even the plain vanilla “very” started life as “verily” (as in, “truthfully”), and yet it can be used for emphasis in statements that are not true.
Words acquire new meanings and shed old ones. The newer use of “literally” to intensify statements that are not literally true (in the traditional sense) is merely one example of lexical change happening before our eyes. T-Rex exemplifies what happens when we cling so hard to our favorite definitions that we deny that additional meanings can evolve. Kids, don’t be like T-Rex.
</linguist_hat>
Nope, I’m with Keaven on this. At least for the reason that I would like to be able to say “literally” and mean “non-figuratively” and have it understood. Even if the “literally” abusers won’t understand what “figuratively” means.
Ah, but you are assuming that multiple meanings of “literally” cannot be disambiguated from context. When you say, “I was literally the last person in line,” the meaning is not made any less clear just because some speakers use the same word in sentences like “I literally jumped out of my skin.”
I would venture to say that most English words have multiple meanings, some promiscuously so. Think of all the different things that “charge” can mean, both as a noun and as a verb. Yet we somehow manage to figure out what is meant in a variety of contexts.
We need an American-English version of the Académie Française … I would be *so* down with that (shocker).
Though, i would probably have to stop throwing ellipsis all over the place, as I tend to do … like that … kinda …
@brandon – that is a poor example. People will say things like, “I was literally the last person in line” in an effort to express how long the line was, or how long they were standing in the line, even though they were not, in fact, the actual last person in that line. You have demonstrated just why such a nonchalant use of the word is so aggravating: You *cannot * always tell from context if they are being literal or not.
Lexical drift rarely responds to decrees from on high. We can wish all we want that people wouldn’t use “literally” in places where we would prefer they use “figuratively”, but that will not stop them from doing so.
Part of any conversation is using your knowledge of a speaker to figure out what they mean by their word choices. A cooperative speaker will try to be clear, but may use some words in a different way than you might expect. No two speakers use all words in exactly the same way; at a sufficiently granular level, we all speak a unique idiolect. Your job as a cooperative listener is to figure out what the speaker means using context, world knowledge, or if necessary, clarification from the speaker.
If instead you berate the speaker for giving you bad input, you are not a cooperative listener; you are a computer.
Yes, you are correct: *wishing* they would stop will not stop them, since you’re not alerting them to their mistake. Correcting their error, however, just might.
Why aren’t you making these “lexical drift” arguments over on the Their, There, and They’re item?
Did you know there are some prescriptivists who insist that “aggravating” should not be used as a synonym for “irritating”? The word, they say, should only be used in the sense of “making something worse”, as in “The auto accident aggravated his sciatica.”
Whenever you interact with a person who holds that belief, would you want them to “correct” your “error” (i.e., your use of “aggravating” in a comment above)? If they pointed out that your usage was “wrong” according to their definition, would you stop using the word to mean “irritating”?
Or would you just roll your eyes and find yourself wanting to avoid such a sanctimonious stickler?
This is a moot argument. The folks over at Merriam-Webster have added “in effect” to the list of definitions for Literally.
Don’t think I’ll forget this, Brandon… [glare] …the next time you try to correct my spelling, pronunciation, or “i think the word you mean is…” I will get all “lexical drift” on your ass 😛 hehe
Brandon, Don’t be so literal!!!!
I’m not saying there’s no such thing as a mistake. One of my favorites comes from the first season of “The Bachelor”, where one of the contestants is on a date with the titular bachelor, and she tells him she wants to “go to Africa and help people and build schools and stuff…you know, be like a mercenary.” Clearly she meant “missionary”, and we can legitimately say this is a mistake in word choice because no one else regularly uses “mercenary” with that meaning.
Of course, there’s a chance that that meaning could catch on, eventually becoming so common in speech that it gets used in casual writing, then formal writing, and *poof* what was a mistake is now a legitimate secondary meaning of “mercenary”, objected to only by the sorts of stodgy prescriptivists who dislike “aggravating” when used for “irritating” . Stranger word shifts have happened.
But for now? Totally a mistake.
I don’t know… I must have you pegged wrong, Brandon. Much like Jim’s confusion at my desire to own a kilt while continuing to abhor shorts, I’m not sure I understand your statement, “I’m not saying there’s no such thing as a mistake” when every time I complain about (what I consider to be) mistakes you chastise me for being intolerant of other peoples perfectly legitimate dialects… or some such.
*I’m* not saying language doesn’t change; I’m just saying people should be held to whatever the current standards are, and properly corrected when they make mistakes.
Accepting the current standard is why I tried to drop this conversation by linking to M-W’s definition of “Literally.” I may not like this acquiescence to mass ignorance (correction: I *hate* it), but that’s the way it is, and I have to accept it.
When most people complain about “mistakes”, they usually mean the sorts of proscriptions they learned as holy writ in grade school (don’t split infinitives, don’t end sentences with prepositions, don’t use “hopefully” as a sentential adverb) or particular common usages that they find distasteful (“literally” as an intensifier, “aggravating” to mean “irritating”, free variation between “which” and “that”).
My point is these are by and large not mistakes at all. Some may not be appropriate in formal writing, but these are questions of register, not of grammatical correctness.
My other point is that “current standards” are a moving target, despite the Sisyphean efforts of prescriptivists to nail them down. We cannot stop language change any more than we can stop plate tectonics. Words mean what they mean not because of something inherent in the word, but solely by convention. Old English “quean” simply meant “woman”, but now it refers to a very specific woman. Is the new usage “wrong”?
My OTHER other point is that not everyone agrees on what the “current standards” are, even in the most restrictive, high-register English of print publications, as evidenced by the existence of competing style manuals. When you criticize someone for an unwarranted use of “literally”, you are doing exactly the same thing as the person who rips into YOU for an “incorrect” use of “aggravating”. You are not *correcting* people to guide them back to some pure, objective standard; you are bludgeoning them over the head for violating your particular usage peccadilloes.
It doesn’t mean that the standards don’t exist, just that they are not black-and-white, absolute, and self-consistent.
To get back on the yes-native-speakers-can-make-mistakes wagon: using words in a way that your speech community does not recognize is a mistake. If I refer to my laptop as a “desktop” (because, I dunno, it sits on my desk), my usage is actually wrong. The reason it’s wrong is that no one I am talking to will understand what kind of computer I have; upon seeing the laptop, they would all agree I gave it the wrong label and caused them confusion.
Contrast that with someone saying “He literally jumped down my throat.” You may find the usage aggravating (heh)–and honestly it’s not a sentence I would produce, either!–but you know exactly what the speaker meant.
Now contrast that with someone saying “He retroactively jumped down my throat!” Which makes no sense, so you ask the speaker what she meant and it turns out she was using “retroactively” as an intensifier. Now that’s something we can call a mistake: a novel usage, unrecognized by others in the speech community, that causes legitimate confusion.
hahahaha… oh man, you are *so* going to hate me 😛
I actually wouldn’t mind that sentence, “he retroactively jumped down my throat.” I wouldn’t take it to be an intensifier, but a description of how “he” jumped down the speaker’s throat after first approving whatever it was that is now causing him to be angry 😛
However, I return to my previous situation of not being able to understand where you are coming from. I have no choice, at this point, but to differ to your expertise as a linguist, and trust you know what you’re talking about … because I sure don’t.
It honestly sounds to me like you’re talking in circles – There are such things as mistakes, but there really aren’t mistakes. That’s what I’m hearing. I *know* I must be hearing it wrong, so I’m not trying to accuse you of anything… I just seem unable to actually decode what you’re trying to get across.
So… yeah. I guess that’s all 😛
Exactly! That’s why it’s a mistake for the speaker to try to use “retroactively” as an intensifier: since the word is not used as such by others in her speech community, she will be misunderstood. It’s in that sense that we can say she misused the word. (The meaning you constructed for the sentence is a plausible one, but it’s not the one she meant.)
Sorry to be talking in circles here; I’m doing a poor job getting my point(s) across. Part of the reason this discussion is so confusing is because the idea of “correctness” in language is non-binary, changes over time, depends a lot on context, and varies from group to group. All of which, I suspect, is anathema to Keaven 😛
Oh, and I have indeed been avoiding questions of spelling standards, including “they’re”/”there”/”their”. That’s a whole nother can of worms I didn’t want to open up for fear of veering off-topic, and frankly my thoughts on the matter aren’t very well fleshed out.
I don’t think it’s a mistake, because there’s nothing about the sentence to suggest it was being used that way. Unlike with, “He literally jumped down my throat,” where it’s obvious the word is being used incorrectly, since one cannot literally jump down another’s throat – well, except maybe Tom Thumb 😉
/stirpot
My only real concern with all this (changes over time, context, dialect differences) is it defeats the idea of a community having a shared language. If we are to believe that Language truly is, “a particular kind of system for encoding and decoding information,” then there needs to be some semblance of order to that codex.
But that brings us right back to my previous position again, and you are correct… I am far more binary in my tolerance than is (probably) warranted. I will admit it is a shortcoming of mine, and I admire your ability to see past in others what would be a roadblock for me.
Setting aside the topic of language change in English, I found this post on Chinese language change pretty interesting. It’s about how the particle bèi ?, which makes verbs passive, is increasingly being used with verbs that can’t normally be passivized in order to express ideas that the Chinese government would rather people didn’t talk about. From the post:
Bah. In submitting my comment, the Chinese characters were mangled into question marks. Sorry for the confusion.
Repurposing language, in order to express a new idea or concept that is not immediately able to be done conventionally (or with the impact needed), is not a problem for me. I think that’s very cool, actually. Biting their thumb at the authorities, “be suicided,” In other words, “we know what you did last summer, bitches.”
I really should let this thread rest in peace, but this morning saw another relevant Dinosaur Comics.
I suspect Dinosaur Comics may be another Thing Keaven Hates, so I link this at my own peril—but I think it’s okay this time because today’s comic lampoons my descriptivist position. In this one, I’m T-Rex and Keaven is God.
…
But don’t let it go to your head 😛
I do not hate Dinosaur Comics. And I think it’s time to let this dead horse rest in peace. Though… i was thinking about this more last night, and I came to more distilled opinion on the matter.
no..
not going to do it..
must… leave… dead… horse… alone…