this post was submitted on 27 Jun 2023
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So, what's the new word for what “literal” used to mean?
Deadass
Honestly, it’s also “literally”. Humans are complex lol.
Back when I was in grade school, there were kids saying "as long as you know what I mean, it doesn't matter". If a word means two different/conflicting things, how can we possibly know what you mean? See also: bimonthly.
Honestly, you're not wrong. As someone who cares a great deal about the accuracy of my communication, I always avoid the word "biweekly" at work for exactly this reason. It's just that...it's complicated. Language is essentially a really big democracy where meaning, structure, etc, are all constantly decided by everyone speaking it. If something becomes allowed by enough people, then it becomes de facto "correct", even if it muddies the system as a whole.
I prefer to take a very pragmatic approach to it all. (For my linguistics friends, I'm not using "pragmatic" in the technical sense.) In situations where communication is important or you don't know your audience well, I would advise people not to use "literally" in the non-literal sense. But if I were teaching English as a foreign language, I would absolutely teach this meaning of "literally" to an advanced learner. To not do so would be a disservice to them and potentially engender misunderstandings. (Whether I would teach something to an advanced second language learner is a good litmus test for whether something is linguistically "correct".)
The other thing (sorry for the long comment) is that humans are generally better at inferring meaning from context than we realize. For instance, I would be willing to bet that most people reading these two sentences pretty easily understand the intended meaning of the word "literally":
In both sentences, the topic of the sentence and the addition of the words / phrases like "oh my gosh" and "quite" go a long way to clarifying the intended meaning.
Also also: I just realized that my use of the word "drink" for "drink alcohol" is an unintentional second example of our ability to infer meaning from context.
And in each of those sentences, the word "literally" is wholly unnecessary. It can be omitted and the sentence would be more correct. The first would be a clear statement of opinion rather than (obviously un-) observed fact. There is some wiggle room for how technically correct the second one is, but when "literally" also means "metaphorically" the second sentence as written is even more vague -- additional context, e.g. the scientific knowledge of the speaker, is necessary.