So don’t use “figuratively” as an intensifier either! Just because that’s ineffective hyperbole doesn’t make its antonym effective or useful. What happens when you use “literally” correctly and everyone thinks you’re using it in its non-literal sense? Now both words are ruined. Good job, die-hard descriptivists!
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I don’t know, what do we say when we mean “truly” as in “really” rather than “truly” as emphasis?
What do we say when we mean “really” as in “actually” rather than “really” as emphasis?
What do we say when we mean “actually” as in “literally” rather than “actually” as emphasis?
It think it is literally the fate of every word that means “literally” to be used for emphasis or for exaggeration. When someone says, “I truly love you” the word “truly” is being used both as an intensifier and for it’s (now archaic?) literal meaning. Since we assume what that if someone says they love us they aren’t lying, so he word is really there to differentiate the love they feel from the love that other people feel which is presented as lesser. Because something being genuine implies the possibility that other things are false, the concepts of intensifying and being truthful overlap.
Because we are assumed to be speaking truthfully and literally without any other indicator the word “literally” is almost entirely useless in common speech. I don’t have to say, “I literally had a sandwich for lunch.” If I wanted to say that something was so funny that I pissed myself I could say, “It was so funny that I peed a little.” Adding the word “literally” calls attention to the fact that something strange in going on.
I once had a discussion in a philosophy class about the literal vs. the figurative where it was important that we distinguished the two. Outside of that, I can’t think of any time I’ve needed to describe something as “literal.”
I find the idea that the word “literally” is a magical meta-word that affects the entire sentence rather than an adverb that modifies the verb it is adjacent to to be far more of a violation of the “rules” of language than the alternative.
Nothing says ineloquence like borrowing a phrase from Mark Twain.
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Yeah, no. They’re not quoting Twain if they haven’t read him.
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Now on the other hand, impact as a verb…and shortly thereafter, as an adverb?! shudders
I hate to break it to you, but …
Cold things must bee applped (sic) in the beginning to hinder the confirming of the griefe, but the vse of them after the beginning, impacteth the matter and encreaseth the payne.
—William Clowes, A Prooued Practise for all Young Chirurgians, 1588
Source:
(Nothing about adverbial use, which I confess I’ve never seen: have you got an example?)
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The company received this award for two of its unique initiatives that are impactfully transforming lives and landscapes in rural India.
Thanks! I still hate the way it sounds, but I am no longer shuddering.
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I think “literally” is useful when describing something that seems too outlandish to be true, but actually is true. To use figuratively for literally is to just use the wrong word, in my opinion.
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But you are calling Twain ineloquent, right?
You can have an impacted wisdom tooth. Asteroids can impact the Earth’s surface. The only problem with “impact” is people using it as a direct synonym for “affect” in order to sound more bookish. Symptom of MBAitis.
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Oh, absolutely. Just like “synergy” is a perfectly respectable word if you’re discussing, say, the effect of taking two or more drugs in combination.
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But “literally” doesn’t mean “truthfully”. It’s not the opposite of “false” it’s the opposite of “figuratively.” You’d have to use it in a case where what you were saying could be mistaken for metaphor rather than a case where what you are saying could be mistaken as a tall tale. I think of watching Bob Saget react to Norm MacDonald telling one-liners at a comedy roast. While the audience was almost silent, the comedians on stage were laughing their asses off[1]. Saget laughed so hard that he fell off the couch onto the floor[2].
[1] You knew this was a metaphor, no ones ass fell off.
[2] Your biggest hint that I meant this actually happened: I just used a metaphor to describe everyone as a group so singling Saget out in a follow up sentence suggests I am differentiating his reaction and “fall on the floor laughing” doesn’t differentiate from “laugh your ass off” as metaphors
Like my example above, if I wanted to express that I laughed so hard that I momentarily lost control of my bladder, which would be more effective:
a) “I pissed myself laughing”
b) “I really pissed myself laughing”
c) “I actually pissed myself laughing”
d) “I literally pissed myself laughing”
e) “I pissed myself laughing, no joke”
f) “I - and I’m not fabricating this, this really happened - pissed myself laughing”
g) “I know that when people say this they usually mean it metaphorically, but I don’t: I pissed myself laughing. I had to take a very shameful cab ride home and change.”
Who knows? Any of those could be a joke, any of the them could be true. I’d suspect the teller had actually peed in their pants if the overall story was positioned as a story about an embarrassing thing that happened to them and I would suspect they were exaggerating or joking if the overall story was positioned as a story about a funny joke. For most people, peeing in their pants is a more important experience than hearing a funny joke, so it’s unlikely to be used as a mere adjective to describe a joke if it actually happened.
I’d have to judge by tone and context. It doesn’t matter how much you protest that you are being truthful, you simply can’t talk about laughing hard enough to lose control of your bladder and be 100% assumed to be serious even though that is a real experience people have been known to have. There’s no magic word that is going to solve that problem.
The only way “literally” could do what people in the anti-figurative-“literally” crowd seem to want it to do is if it was a different part of speech. It would have to be a safe word or an escape character for conversations. The only word I can think of that has a similar place grammatically is “sic”, which always appears in parentheses or brackets because it cannot be used as part of a sentence.
Honestly, saying “literally” can’t be used figuratively strikes me as the same as saying you can’t write “blue” in black ink.
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Sic semper evello mortem tyrannis.
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The analogy is closer to writing “this is written in black ink” in blue ink.
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Now I’m obligated to quote from The Chaos
Dearest creature in creation,
Study English pronunciation.
I will teach you in my verse
Sounds like corpse, corps, horse, and worse.
I will keep you, Susy, busy,
Make your head with heat grow dizzy.
Tear in eye, your dress will tear.
So shall I! Oh hear my prayer.
Pray, console your loving poet,
Make my coat look new, dear, sew it!
Just compare heart, beard, and heard,
Dies and diet, lord and word,
Sword and sward, retain and Britain.
(Mind the latter, how it’s written.)
Made has not the sound of bade,
Say-said, pay-paid, laid, but plaid.
Now I surely will not plague you
With such words as vague and ague.
But be careful how you speak:
Say break and steak, but bleak and streak;
Previous, precious, fuchsia, via; Cloven, oven, how and low,
Script, receipt, shoe, poem, and toe.
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Only if the use of “literally” in question is “This sentence is literally true.”
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The tough coughs as he ploughs the dough.
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The roughshod ploughman rode through Marlborough, coughing and hiccoughing thoroughly.
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Yeah, that is literally the meaning of the word.
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It isn’t. Adverbs modify verbs, not the sentences they are contained in.
I don’t have to read, “I quickly walked down the street” quickly.
If I say, “I literally waltzed down the street,” would you insist that this is true only if I was actually dancing in 3/4 time as I moved along the street? Or that it was true only if I was actually dancing in 3/4 time while moving along a street straight towards the centre of the Earth?
And if Tom Sawyer were to say “I literally waltzed down the street” would we say that cannot be true because he is a fictional character and thus could not have done so in actual real life? No, the entire sentence is contained with the fiction and describes something happening within the fiction. Something that literally happened fictionally.
In that sentence literally modifies “waltzing”, but probably not “down” or “street” (which is taken to be literal without any modifier), and certainly not “I” (who may, literally, not exist).
If I described someone arriving in a hospital with a hole through their foot made by stepping on a sharp object, I could say, “It looked as if he literally shot himself in the foot”. Here “literally” modifies “shot himself in the foot” to indicate it is a description of the actual act of shooting oneself in an appendage rather than the figure of speech. However, I don’t mean that he literally did that, the entire clause is figurative, as indicated by “as if”.
Literally can be used figuratively, it can be used literally while speaking figuratively or fictionally. It can be used to modify a single word or a whole phrase but not to modify the entire sentence it is in (without reference to the sentence).
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