Mistakes and Misunderstandings: Internet denizen butchering of phrases

[Aedilred]

But "literally" isn't useless. Seriously, if I write "I literally exploded when...", do you really doubt what happened? You might as well say that "who" is useless now because it can be used in to objective and subjective case. Or that "you" is useless because it can refer to the singular as well as the plural (and the objective as well as the subjective case).

Well, obviously, these examples are ridiculous. The problems arise when the context isn't clear and it could mean either. As is the case with "literally" quite a lot. As I mentioned before.

Language is about communication. Defining a word so that it can mean its own antonym and in any situation where the two could be confused there is no way of telling which meaning is meant without metaknowledge of the speaker or asking for clarification runs directly counter to the entire purpose of language in the first place.

Of course, I forgot that it's impossible for anyone to be wrong about anything, so I apologise for that. That was wrong differently right of me.

But really, I find the universal permissive descriptivism approach often advocated to be just as foolish and infuriating as the unchanging monolithic prescriptivism - which is a straw man anyway. This is really just one of the front lines between Law and Chaos, I guess.

[Asta Kask]

See, the "oh, languages change, get over it, this isn't the Middle Ages" argument is a bit of a cheap one. I did say 2011, not 446.

Yes, but when is your "post"? 1500? Then double negatives are fine. And "awful" means the same as "awe-inspiring".

[QUOTE=Aedilred;17774180]And it also kind of misses the point. Obviously English has changed quite a lot over the centuries, but that's the thing - over centuries. The bulk of the language has remained essentially unchanged for 500 years.

'And in part him; but' you may say 'not well:
But, if't be he I mean, he's very wild;
Addicted so and so:' and there put on him
What forgeries you please; marry, none so rank
As may dishonour him; take heed of that;
But, sir, such wanton, wild and usual slips
As are companions noted and most known
To youth and liberty.

In fact, when I saw this I thought it was the text to the new Miley Cyrus song.

The problem with modern descriptivism is that the internet has allowed the easy propagation of errors, misspellings, miscommunications and so forth and by surrendering to that we accelerate the process of change so that it's visibly changing on a year-by-year, even month-by-month basis.

Reference? What evidence do you have for this thesis?

But often it's a relatively small subset of the whole population who are driving the change and by pandering to their errors rather than attempting to correct them it gradually homogenises the language as a whole until words become - like "literally" - useless, and the language is the worse for it.

Homogenisation tends to slow change rather than accelerate it. Evolutionary change in a large species pool is slower than it is in a small one. I would expect the same is true in languages.

Well, obviously, these examples are ridiculous. The problems arise when the context isn't clear and it could mean either. As is the case with "literally" quite a lot. As I mentioned before.

Here an example would be nice.

Language is about communication.

Not... exactly. It's about social situations, and there are quite a few situations where miscommunication can provide a benefit. And language supports this use.

Defining a word so that it can mean its own antonym and in any situation where the two could be confused there is no way of telling which meaning is meant without metaknowledge of the speaker or asking for clarification runs directly counter to the entire purpose of language in the first place.

We must immediately purge the language of these words/phrases (at least of one of their meanings):

"To cleave" can mean "to cling" or "to split".
"Custom" can mean "standard" (shorthand for customary) or "tailored".
"To dust" can mean to remove dust (cleaning a house) or to add dust (e.g. to dust a cake with powdered sugar).
"Inflammable" technically means "capable of burning" but is commonly taken to mean "unburnable".[1]
"Oversight" (uncountable) means "supervision", "an oversight" (countable) means "not noticing something".
"Pass on" can mean "reject from" and "continue through a process" (e.g. "Let's pass on this candidate").
"Refrain" means both non-action and the repetition of an action, e.g. in musical notation.
"To rent" can mean "to borrow from" or "to lend to".
"To replace" can mean "to place back where it was" or "substitute with something else".
"Resigned" can mean "to have signed again" or "to have quit". The former is sometimes hyphenated as "re-signed".
"To sanction" can mean "to permit" or "to punish".
"Off" can mean "something that is not operating" or it can mean "to start happening in an excited way" (e.g. "The buzzer went off").
"Belie" can mean "to show to be false" or it can mean "to misrepresent".
"Literally" means exact or not exaggerated, but due to colloquial use even the Oxford Dictionary has added a second definition: "Used for emphasis or to express strong feeling while not being literally true".
"Deceptively" followed by any adjective can have ambiguous meaning: for example, a room being "deceptively large" could be larger or smaller than it seems.

Of course, I forgot that it's impossible for anyone to be wrong about anything, so I apologise for that. That was wrong differently right of me.

People can be definitely be wrong. Saying that 'literally' is now useless, for example, is wrong.

But really, I find the universal permissive descriptivism approach often advocated to be just as foolish and infuriating as the unchang[ing monolithic prescriptivism - which is a straw man anyway. This is really just one of the front lines between Law and Chaos, I guess.

So what changes would you advocate to the pre-2011 post-ca1511 language?

[Aedilred]

"To cleave" can mean "to cling" or "to split".

"Cleave to" vs "cleave"

"Custom" can mean "standard" (shorthand for customary) or "tailored".

Noun vs adjective.

"To dust" can mean to remove dust (cleaning a house) or to add dust (e.g. to dust a cake with powdered sugar).

Always made clear by context.

Inflammable" technically means "capable of burning" but is commonly taken to mean "unburnable".[1]

People commonly take things to mean all sorts of things they don't. Pass.

"Oversight" (uncountable) means "supervision", "an oversight" (countable) means "not noticing something".

As you say yourself, uncountable vs countable.

"Pass on" can mean "reject from" and "continue through a process" (e.g. "Let's pass on this candidate").

On this one you have a point, albeit only in writing, since otherwise emphasis makes it clear.

"Refrain" means both non-action and the repetition of an action, e.g. in musical notation.

Verb vs noun.

"To rent" can mean "to borrow from" or "to lend to".

"Rent" vs "rent to".

And so on.

Here an example would be nice.

I gave you one back when this conversation started. You ignored it in favour of mockery.

Bye.

[Asta Kask]

As Britney Spears would say "I commend you to your own content". Or was it Shakespeare? I can hardly tell the language apart.

[Fragenstein]

"I could care less" drives me up the wall. And that is wrong. I don't buy that it's "ironic" or sarcastic, either, because it's used in exactly the same tone, context and sense as the logical and sense-making "I couldn't care less", and I've never heard it used in isolation with any suggestion of actual sarcasm. Curiously, I've only seen it appear in the last couple of years, mostly from American sources and online, but I daresay it's been lurking for a while.

This one has never bothered me, but I seem to remember hearing the phrase "As if I could care less", quite often in the late '70s/early '80s. That might just be my mis-imagination, though. The corruption to "I could care less" felt like a natural shortening as long as the tone reflected the required sarcasm.

"Buttload" is accurate, based on the butt as a unit of measurement (of wine) as mentioned above. I am not sure, but I wouldn't be surprised if "boatload" is a bowdlerisation of "buttload" based on an etymological misinterpretation.

"Buttload" just seemed like a deliberate, juvenile corruption of boatload. The latter didn't quite have enough zing for us kids.

Of course, to add to the list of complaints, "literally", used to mean "figuratively". I know one or two people (I do it myself from time to time when I think the company will appreciate it) who have started using "figuratively" as an emphatic, just because. Given that even the OED has offered an alternative definition of "literally" meaning "not literally", though, I have no idea what purpose that word serves in our language any more.

S'truth. It seems as if "literally" adds almost nothing to a sentence other than an extra few syllables. Even when using the word "properly", what's it doing?

"I literally ate a ham sandwich."

Was there a chance the listener could think I figuratively ate a ham sandwich?

"I was so surprised, I literally sat down for a moment."

Sitting after a surprise requires clarification?

I'm only really comfortable when there is a decent chance of a literal statement being taken figuratively.

"His head literally exploded."
"You mean figuratively."
"No, literally. The Road Runner tricked him into eating the explosive bird seed and the Coyote's head literally exploded."

Here's one that I only learned recently:

Tow the Line/Toe the Line.

I honestly wasn't aware it was "Toe".

[SarahV]

Something about the literally/figuratively argument going on in this thread is bothering me... and it's this: language evolves, sure, but it's a two-way street. People like Aedilred (and myself) arguing that using "literally" to mean "figuratively" is stupid and silly and damaging to the language are just as much a part of that evolution as the people who are actually using the word in that way.

Language evolution doesn't mean "Some people are saying X, therefore we must all now embrace it forevermore without argument, because linguistic theory says so!" It means that some people say X, some people say Y, some people think X is stupid and make fun of people for saying it, some people argue endlessly about X and Y on the internet, some people roll their eyes and call those people grammar nazis, and the majority of people don't really care either way. Eventually, some version of the X vs. Y argument will win out; and someday everyone who isn't a linguist will forget it was ever an issue.

Lots of words are used in some trendy or strange way and then, a few years later, people stop saying them and those definitions or neologisms don't remain in the language. "Literally" as "figuratively" is a really good candidate for that to happen, IMO.

[Fragenstein]

Something about the literally/figuratively argument going on in this thread is bothering me... and it's this: language evolves, sure, but it's a two-way street. People like Aedilred (and myself) arguing that using "literally" to mean "figuratively" is stupid and silly and damaging to the language are just as much a part of that evolution as the people who are actually using the word in that way.

Except for me. I'm arguing that the word is almost entirely superfluous.

[BWR]

What goes for one dialect doesn't go for all of them. That's the thing about dialects. There are dialects that still use "thee". And Old and Middle English are actually different languages from Modern English, with a completely different grammatical structure in the case of Old English, so the view that "it's in Old English so it's ok" doesn't really help.


And the thread is at least nominally about what people say on the internet, where written English is the norm.

1. I don't recall claiming multiple negatives were a feature of all English dialects. I recall saying they were not. Pointing to older versions of the languages is to show that it is an inherited aspect in these dialects, not some recently developed oddity.

2. And the sort of mistakes people make on the 'net are restricted to the 'net? Most of the listed issues are not unique to the Internet or even written English. People not knowing the difference between 'lie' and 'lay' or the meaning of 'figuratively' is not a matter of purely written English.

[Haruki-kun]

But "literally" isn't useless. Seriously, if I write "I literally exploded when...", do you really doubt what happened?

I wouldn't doubt what happened I would just think you expressed it wrong.

You might as well say that "who" is useless now because it can be used in to objective and subjective case. Or that "you" is useless because it can refer to the singular as well as the plural (and the objective as well as the subjective case).

No. No, you might not. In order for this argument to be valid one meaning of the word "you" would have to be "you" and the other meaning of the word "you" would have to be "not you."

"Literally" was originally taken to mean "not figuratively, in case there was any confusion." For instance "I was literally glued to my seat. I spilled glue by accident and forgot to clean it."

I think your position reduces to "we should all speak as I did when I was 15-20", which I find rather silly.

I don't know about Aidelred, but I don't want everyone to speak like I did when I was 15. ._. I said "lol" in real life.

On another note:

Yes, but when is your "post"? 1500? Then double negatives are fine. And "awful" means the same as "awe-inspiring".

Something awful can be awe-inspiring, too... I understand what you mean by this point, though. I'll grant you this one.

It's about social situations, and there are quite a few situations where miscommunication can provide a benefit. And language supports this use.

The intention is to avoid miscommunication.

We must immediately purge the language of these words/phrases (at least of one of their meanings):

"To cleave" can mean "to cling" or "to split".
"Custom" can mean "standard" (shorthand for customary) or "tailored".
"To dust" can mean to remove dust (cleaning a house) or to add dust (e.g. to dust a cake with powdered sugar).
"Inflammable" technically means "capable of burning" but is commonly taken to mean "unburnable".[1]
"Oversight" (uncountable) means "supervision", "an oversight" (countable) means "not noticing something".
"Pass on" can mean "reject from" and "continue through a process" (e.g. "Let's pass on this candidate").
"Refrain" means both non-action and the repetition of an action, e.g. in musical notation.[/B]
"To rent" can mean "to borrow from" or "to lend to".
"To replace" can mean "to place back where it was" or "substitute with something else".[/B]
"Resigned" can mean "to have signed again" or "to have quit". The former is sometimes hyphenated as "re-signed".
"To sanction" can mean "to permit" or "to punish".
"Off" can mean "something that is not operating" or it can mean "to start happening in an excited way" (e.g. "The buzzer went off").
"Belie" can mean "to show to be false" or it can mean "to misrepresent".
"Literally" means exact or not exaggerated, but due to colloquial use even the Oxford Dictionary has added a second definition: "Used for emphasis or to express strong feeling while not being literally true".
"Deceptively" followed by any adjective can have ambiguous meaning: for example, a room being "deceptively large" could be larger or smaller than it seems.

Aidelred already addressed these individually, so I won't do it again, but I'll just make my stance the following: A lot of these are homonyms. A homonym is not the same as a misuse. Notably, the word "refrain" in this list. One is a verb, the other one is a noun. There isn't much room for confusion thanks to the context.

People can be definitely be wrong. Saying that 'literally' is now useless, for example, is wrong.

It's not useless. It's just confusing.

[Brazen Shield]

[SiuiS]

You ever notice how some people put their Personal Identification Number numbers into Automated Teller Machine machines?

That does bother me, aye. PIN number works because the flow of the rhythm fits well enough, even if it's redundant, but arm machine is so clunky.

But "literally" isn't useless. Seriously, if I write "I literally exploded when...", do you really doubt what happened? You might as well say that "who" is useless now because it can be used in to objective and subjective case. Or that "you" is useless because it can refer to the singular as well as the plural (and the objective as well as the subjective case).

I think your position reduces to "we should all speak as I did when I was 15-20", which I find rather silly.

The problem there is not that "literally" has multiple meanings, but that "exploded" has multiple meanings, including an excessive expression of emotional distress in a wa that can cause anxiety and similar reactions in others. This person literally did do that.

The question is whether use of the word literal changes the possibilities of what literally happened. Can you literally perform a [colloquial phrase for an action not denoted by strict usage]?

... Okay. You win.

[Wardog]

Pre-2011 standards, before the language was murdered. This is the problem with descriptivist linguistics. "Literally" is now, literally, a useless word.

Something about the literally/figuratively argument going on in this thread is bothering me... and it's this: language evolves, sure, but it's a two-way street. People like Aedilred (and myself) arguing that using "literally" to mean "figuratively" is stupid and silly and damaging to the language are just as much a part of that evolution as the people who are actually using the word in that way.

Language evolution doesn't mean "Some people are saying X, therefore we must all now embrace it forevermore without argument, because linguistic theory says so!" It means that some people say X, some people say Y, some people think X is stupid and make fun of people for saying it, some people argue endlessly about X and Y on the internet, some people roll their eyes and call those people grammar nazis, and the majority of people don't really care either way. Eventually, some version of the X vs. Y argument will win out; and someday everyone who isn't a linguist will forget it was ever an issue.

Lots of words are used in some trendy or strange way and then, a few years later, people stop saying them and those definitions or neologisms don't remain in the language. "Literally" as "figuratively" is a really good candidate for that to happen, IMO.

The problem seems to be that some descriptivist act exactly as SarahV says they shouldn't, and in doing so effectively wrap around and become prescriptivists.

To my mind, "how language is used" includes everyone that uses that language, including all the people who haven't accepted - or are even aware of - the latest trendy or technical meaning of a word. And also all the books etc that were written before the meaning changed but are still in reasonably common use. Unfortunately some people seem to latch on to very new meanings of words and insists those are (now) the only valid meaning and that everyone who still uses them in the old way (even if they are still the majority) have to "get with the times" and change. Or worse, they sometimes done seem to even be aware that their pet meaning is a minority and new meaning, and get surprised or confused when they see it used in an older way.