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I'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 common

by hugh3 16y ago

I'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 ago
As 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 ago
From 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 ago
It'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...
- kenjackson 16y ago
  I'm going to start using autoantonyms in completely ambiguous ways in email. I love it!

by hugh3 16y ago

GiraffeNecktie 16y ago

As 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 ago

From 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 ago

It'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...

kenjackson 16y ago
I'm going to start using autoantonyms in completely ambiguous ways in email. I love it!