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Oh wow, I know this isn't what you meant but wouldn't it be great if we could use literally and litterally to mean literally and figuratively??
by Godel_unicode 6y ago
Oh wow, I know this isn't what you meant but wouldn't it be great if we could use literally and litterally to mean literally and figuratively??
- jfoutz 6y agoHa! And punish my poor spelling even more.
- DonHopkins 6y agoI thought you were making a valid point that spelling drifts too!
- srtjstjsj 6y agoWe can, but everyone uses literally to mean litterally.
- dllthomas 6y agoA digression, but I don't think this is actually the case. I readily acknowledge that literally is often used when a sentence is figurative; that's not the same thing. For literally to be used to mean figuratively the utterer would be worried that, but for the presence of "literally", the sentence might be understood to be literal. I contend that the role "literally" usually plays is that of an intensifier. I believe it plays that role through ordinary application of hyperbole: the utterance "X is literally Y" is usually meant as "X is very Y; X is so Y it is almost as if it were literally Y; but of course you understand that it was not, in fact, literally Y - we're all reasonable people here." In much the same way, when someone says "You left me waiting for days" and it's been a handful of minutes, we don't say "'days' sometimes means 'minutes'" - we say that people exaggerate. I recognize that I'm disagreeing with at least one dictionary; I believe they got it wrong. And I won't claim that there is literally no single person who in fact uses "literally" to mean "figuratively" - but I have never encountered such an example and I believe it to be rare enough that we can consider it an error, even in a descriptivist treatment.