Aren’t you judging the beauty of language according to the standards of the culturally hegemonic anyway? In fact, the concept of beauty in language is virtually impossible to separate from imposed virtues of correctness anyway - irrespective of the language in question.
This is a mistake with regards to “its” that I made until the age of about 26, and that’s despite being a straight A student in English and English Literature.
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I still do it (along with there/they’re/their errors) occasionally when I’m typing and looking at the keyboard (never quite learnt to touch-type). I usually catch it on first read-through before hitting “reply”.
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I understand that the strippers, Hitler and Stalin, are concerned about the issue.
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I would never have guessed English was a second language for you.
I have seen these scenes play out over and over again.
American says casually “Oh I speak xxxxx!” and can barely get out the very basics with terrible pronunciation. They basically watched Dora the Explorer 20 years ago and remember a bit.
Non-American says “No” when asked if they speak English. But then over the coming days it’s clear they’ve understood the majority of the English spoken, and eventually start speaking English rather well!
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I like to say that while I don’t speak French, I can butcher it fluently. I never say this in French because I never learned the French equivalent for the metaphorical use of the verb ‘butcher’.
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Uhh… yeah NO. It’s one thing to accept shifts in meaning of words like, say, “gay,” or “computer,” and another to say it’s OK to make the word “literally” literally useless. If it means one thing and the opposite, it means nothing at all.
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“Brilliant" is in the eye of the beholder. What I liked is expressed in a different way here: http://writerystuff.tumblr.com/post/100909856395/a-ps-to-the-poster-i-put-up-yesterday http://writerystuff.tumblr.com/post/100909856395/a-ps-to-the-poster-i-put-up-yesterday
better than I can say it.
“Literally not interested” is perfectly accurate using the “outdated” definition. When someone says, “When the boss called him in, he was literally shaking in his boots,” I can’t help wondering whether the shaking was visible (and whether he was wearing boots…). Or “I was literally shivering with fear.” Really literally literally? Or only figuratively literally? Being a writer/copy editor/proofreader, I need to know in a professional capacity—and in a personal capacity, I’m curious.
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and still laws are often vague and open to interpretation, I like it best when a clause sounds superficially clear without ambiguity but a court decision unveils a completely different meaning (the tax code is prone for this, though this may be intended with all the lobbyists co-writing the stuff)
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That works. But it’s (obviously) wordier. And I fear that “actually” would then go the same way and get to mean, “well, not in actual fact.” And then “in actual fact” would go the same way too… Eventually we won’t be able to convey the meaning that something did indeed literally 
happen.
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My favorite response to something I once posted was, “Obviously your just to ignorant…” To which I replied, “Pot, meet kettle!” Which my respondent probably found incomprehensible, but which at least made me feel better.
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Thank you! You are my king of kings. (The Ctrl-F thing was a long standing annoyance for me, so now it’s a little better.)
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I was being ironic. If I say I am literally not interested in something, it can’t be true, because if it were true I wouldn’t be motivated to say anything about it. So in that sense I was using the term “literal” figuratively.
The deeper irony in all this is that of course the word “literal” is a degenerate colloquialism of the original latin word “litera” which explicitly refers to letters, signs, words and books, as in “literary.” The term literal means “what the words mean,” but since words don’t have inherent meanings, the word literal, if taken literally, is referring to a semantic void.
I’m sure this is great fun from the perspective of editing books! But as for the example of “literally shivering with fear,” if the statement were meant to be taken literally, there would be no need to say literally; the fact that the word literally was used here suggests that it was being used for metaphorical emphasis. I don’t think as an editor you should actually try to answer that question. Of course, I say this as an author who has had an editor quite substantially change the meaning of what I wrote in the service of (otherwise perfectly legitimate) adherence to a style guide, so perhaps I am biased. 
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Well, for one, my t-shirt does.
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I don’t think that we really run the risk of not being able to convey meaning. We just can’t ever convey exact meaning, and that was always true, even before the meaning of the word “litera” got corrupted to mean something quite different.
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I realize I’m going to come across as some uptight, grumpy oldster, but I have to say that I disagree with Mona Chalabi.
Apart from cases where the intent really is to shut someone down, make him or her feel and/or look bad, if one cares about language, if one cares about clear, accurate, and correct grammar, why should one not bring a mistake or error to the attention of the person who is misusing the language? If it is done respectfully, in an appropriate way at an appropriate time, how is this hurting anyone?
The very sound of someone misusing language grates on my ear; it makes my hackles rise. By Ms. Chalabi’s logic, those who abuse language in my presence are persecuting me!!
One final thought: if grammar doesn’t matter, then where do we draw the line? At what point does total disregard for linguistic rules become something worth correcting?
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Nope! That’s literally not true. 
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I may be described in discrete quantities, but I have discreet qualities.
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The “winner” isn’t arbitrary because no, that kind of possessive does not use an apostrophe, ever, and because the possessive apostrophe and the contraction apostrophe serve completely different grammatical purposes.
Your have yours.
He has his.
She has hers.
We have ours.
They have theirs.
It has its.
Pronoun possessives never use an apostrophe, because they don’t need an apostrophe to distinguish them from a plural homonym. Dogs dog’s and dogs’ all mean different things, so the apostrophe is the only thing that allows them to be distinguished and the meaning to be clearly conveyed. Hers her’s and hers’ do not mean different things, because the latter are not actually words.
But that’s very different from a contraction of the conjugated verb “to be”, where the apostrophe is an alert that a letter is missing.
I am so I’m
You are so you’re
He is so he’s
She is so she’s
We are so we’re
They are so they’re
It is so it’s
There is nothing arbitrary about its vs it’s. Its is a possessive pronoun and it follows the very same rules as all other possessive pronouns, which do not require apostrophes to distinguish them from plurals. It’s is a contraction of it is, and it follows the very same rules as all other contracted “to be” verb forms, which require the apostrophe to denote the missing letter of the contraction.
Also:
http://www.angryflower.com/itsits.gif
(Or “it has”.)
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