#abusage

[doeyedangel]

how's it going doe!

AHDKSJFKSKF OMG!! MY HEART!!! ive literally been nonstop thinking abt messaging u (´°̥̥̥̥̥̥̥̥ω°̥̥̥̥̥̥̥̥｀) things have been going pretty okay!!!! I miss u!!!!!!!! How are you???

[sigmastolen]

dear fic writers,

the adjective you want is taut, not taunt.

lexically yrs, sigma

[leverag3]

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[brooklynyogi-blog]

Descriptive and Prescriptive Grammar: On the Misuse of “Literally”

“Did you know that probing the seamy underbelly of U.S. lexicography reveals ideological strife and controversy and intrigue and nastiness and fervor on a nearly hanging-chad scale? For instance, did you know that some modern dictionaries are notoriously liberal and others notoriously conservative, and that certain conservative dictionaries were actually conceived and designed as corrective responses to the "corruption" and "permissiveness" of certain liberal dictionaries? That the oligarchic device of having a special "Distinguished Usage Panel ... of outstanding professional speakers and writers" is an attempted compromise between the forces of egalitarianism and traditionalism in English, but that most linguistic liberals dismiss the Usage Panel as mere sham-populism? Did you know that U.S. lexicography even had a seamy underbelly?” - David Foster Wallace, “Tense Present: Democracy, English, and the Wars over Usage” (Harper’s Magazine, April 2001) The “word police” have an important role to play in the preservation of language.  As recently noted on this site, the ambiguous use of a word such as “literally” can narrow the range of language, which leads, if taken to the extremes of Orwell’s Newspeak, to the eventual erasure of entire concepts and realms of vision from the human experience. In less extreme cases, the misuse of a word simply makes it more difficult to know what the speaker means to say.  A word can have two meanings (or three meanings, or four or five, etc.); but, as long as those meanings are all listed in a dictionary, it is possible to discern the speaker’s intention by gauging the context in which that word is used. It becomes more difficult to do so when a word has a meaning not listed in the dictionary.  While it is possible for listeners familiar with such usages to discern the speaker’s intent, it tends ultimately to confuse the issue, running counter to the aim of clear and comprehensible communication. We cannot, of course, dismiss the natural evolution of language when speaking of new usages of a word in English.  The reason dictionaries are evolving entities and not set in stone (so to speak) is that a word’s meaning depends, in the end, on how it is used.  This is why dictionaries provide examples of words in context (the OED in particular aims to demonstrate the landmark and initial usages); and also why they mark certain words as obs., meaning “obsolete”: to indicate that such words are no longer used in the fashion that they once were.   Because the concept of obsoleteness exists, because language does evolve, we cannot say that a word used contrary to the dictionary definition is ipso facto “wrong”; it must be “wrong” according to a given set of standards.  Currently, the word “literally” is being used incorrectly according to its historical and dictionary definition.  “Literally” means without exaggeration, or taken in the usual meaning; whereas the increasingly more common meaning is something more like the way “like” is used by teenagers - to imply, contrary to the normal meaning, that exaggeration is being employed.  For example, one might say, “I have, like, a million hours of homework to do” or “I have literally a million hours of homework to do.”  Both mean that you have a lot of homework to do, not that the homework will actually take you a million hours to complete. We don’t blink when we hear “literally” used this way nowadays, although many of us might cringe.  It could be that we don’t like it because it runs counter to the definition we are familiar with, or that this usage is simply new, and thus distasteful to prescriptive grammaticists, who prefer words to be used according to their dictionary definitions.   I think it the reason it makes us so upset, however, is something entirely different: the fact that it used to mean the opposite of its dictionary definition.  Neologisms are an accepted part of the English language, and though we might at first resist using them, rarely do we rail against their users with the kind of fervor that is aimed at users of “literally” who mean “figuratively.” Unlike many words used incorrectly to mean something entirely different from the word’s dictionary meaning, or neologisms, which give a name to something newly born, there is some connection here between the existing dictionary definition and its evolved meaning.  We might infer that whoever first used this word in this way had some inkling of an idea what it meant, and that the word he was actually hoping to use was beyond his reach, outside his vocabulary.  Hence, he merely emphasized it, hoping thereby to indicate that the opposite was true.  (This emphasis, here used to indicate opposition, recalls the way we italicize words when we want to emphasize them in some way, but do not have the tools or resources to do so.)   The usage of “literally” to mean “figuratively” is not an exciting neologism but instead an abhorrent error because it indicates a certain linguistic laziness, a failure to “say what you mean and mean what you say.”  This abusage of the word is not an addition to the English language, but a compression of expression.  When you use “literally” to mean both “literally" and “figuratively,” you no longer need the word “figuratively,” and we can infer that if used in this way for long enough, the word “figuratively” may eventually disappear from use altogether.  This abusage is not an addition to language; rather, it is a deletion, a wiping-out of its opposite, which is one step on the rightly frightening path to Orwell’s dystopia.