No one is confused by hearing "less" vs "fewer"; but with "literally" it's a very different story. It's reasonable IMHO to protect clarity by objecting to uses that ... well, make a word useless by making it harder to parse which of two contradictory meanings was intended.
And that applies double if the word exists for precisely that kind of disambiguation!
- literally blue (painted blue or colored some other way)
- literally blue (skin blueish from lack of oxygen)
- he was really cold or something (exaggerated metaphor)
Or probably other stuff.
Like most things, you need more context to determine the relationship between the statement and reality. None of these meanings depend on the word "literally" it can disambiguate between two related statements but nothing in language can escape the idea of being used in a metaphorical context.
It always bugs me when people "correct" this totally fine use of language. We don't freak out nearly so much about similar words like actually, really, totally, completely, absolutely, etc being used in the same way.
It's no big deal. Metaphor is a core part of our language.
>It always bugs me when people "correct" this totally fine use of language. We don't freak out nearly so much about similar words like actually, really, totally, completely, absolutely, etc being used in the same way.
Because of a) insensitivity to those who have a hard time parsing tone, and b) none of those have a metasyntanctic function that specifically speaks to how the words should be interpreted.
By contrast, we do freak out when people misuse deliberately technical language e.g. 0400 hours to mean 4pm.
>It's no big deal. Metaphor is a core part of our language.
And being insensitive to the needs of those different from us is a core part of being human. But there are better and worse ways to be human, and better and worse ways to make metaphors.
This is a really good point, and I agree. There are many ways to use language "correctly" and still end up being unclear. I am in favor of clarity of meaning. Irony/metaphor plays with that but good communicators can use them to have more fun an enhance a message.
I really like your perspective though. I need to fold that in to how I think about this stuff.
Separately, I think they do have that meaning in most contexts. "actually died laughing" "really fell apart during interview" "totally lost control" "he was absolutely insane" etc