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Having raised two "boys who read," (and three girls as well), I think that the secret here is, like many aspects of "how to," simply lead by example. Read to y
by jeffbarr 16y ago
Having raised two "boys who read," (and three girls as well), I think that the secret here is, like many aspects of "how to," simply lead by example.
Read to your kids when they are very young, let them see you read, make sure that there are plenty of interesting books around, and do your best to instill them with a sense of curiosity. From time to time, drop a book on their bed or desk and say "you might find this one interesting."
Also, my secret policy is to always buy my kids whatever books they ask for, without consideration to price or budget. My younger son (20) almost literally eats advanced math books for breakfast. I am happy to keep him well-fed.
Net-net: Well-informed kids who love to read and a house stuffed with books.
- hugh3 16y agoMy younger son (20) almost literally eats advanced math books for breakfast. I'm not sure I understand what it means to almost-literally eat advanced maths books for breakfast. I understand what it means to do it figuratively, and I understand what it means to do it literally, but I'm afraid that almost-literally has me puzzled. edit: Wow, modded down to -4 for linguistic pedantry? That's unusual.
- jeffbarr 16y agoHugh, he attacks the books with such vigor that they are sometimes almost destroyed in the process. Perhaps I was exaggerating a bit, but not by much!
- kenjackson 16y agoThe definition of literally has changed over time. Now a commonly accepted definition is: "used for emphasis: used with figurative expressions to add emphasis" So "literally" is one of the few words that keeps its traditional meaning and means the opposite as well (like "bad" :-))
- hugh3 16y agoI'm not sure where the dividing line is between "has changed its meaning" and "is commonly misused", but I'm pretty sure that "literally" is still on the commonly-misused side of things. Very few words come to mean their exact opposites via misuse. (I am assured that "bad" meant "good" in some brief period of the 80s in which I was too young to know the cool slang, but it wasn't because people were confused about which meant which.)
- GiraffeNecktie 16y agoAs an editor I'd correct it if it was in a very formal context but it's a perfectly acceptable colloquial usage for casual communication including emails and online forums. Language is living, breathing and constantly changing. Words mean what people intend them and understand them to mean, not necessarily what they mean ... uh ... literally.
- kenjackson 16y agoFrom American Heritage below. They seem to indicate that this has been "misused" for a long time. I use ding people for this, but now I think its overly pedantic, and now I think I'm technically wrong to even ding them. "Usage Note: For more than a hundred years, critics have remarked on the incoherency of using literally in a way that suggests the exact opposite of its primary sense of "in a manner that accords with the literal sense of the words." In 1926, for example, H.W. Fowler cited the example "The 300,000 Unionists will be literally thrown to the wolves." The practice does not stem from a change in the meaning of literally itself -- if it did, the word would long since have come to mean "virtually" or "figuratively", but from a natural tendency to use the word as a general intensive, as in They had literally no help from the government on the project, where no contrast with the figurative sense of the words is intended."
- JustinSeriously 16y agoIt's an auto-antonym, a word that has two opposite meanings. Wikipedia used to have a good list of them, but it looks like they just deleted it. Thank god for revision history: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=List_of_auto-antonyms_in_English&oldid=386146896 http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=List_of_auto-anton...
- philwelch 16y agoSo some people don't use "literally" literally anymore.
- stevejb 16y agoI think the real fail of this thread is that the actual substance of the comment was lost amidst a pedantry pissing contest.
- VBprogrammer 16y ago...the real failure... Sorry.
- thebigshane 16y agoLiterally no one uses "literally" literally anymore.
- dctoedt 16y ago> a commonly accepted definition [of 'literally'] ... Really? If so, that's worse than "impact" used as a verb, or some of my relatives' apparent belief that certain prepositions no longer take objects ("we're going to the movies; ya wanna come with?") [/old-fart-mode]
- eru 16y agoFunny, in German the literal translation "Willst Du mitkommen?" is perfectly fine ("mit" means "with"). But we do not normally strand our preposition (i.e. put them at the end of a sentence).
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- eru 16y agoJust an aside: Shouldn't your son be studying mathematics at a university at this age?
- jeffbarr 16y agoHe is studying Applied Math and Physics. He took 8 math textbooks with him when we went to South America for "summer break."