[function_seven]

> irregardless is not a word.

Lots of dictionaries disagree. But not me! I'll join you on this hill, regardless of what those dumb dictionaries say.

The misuse of "literally" and the common use of "irregardless" are the red pills that have turned me into a crotchety old ... prescriptivist.

[narcraft]

People say that people use literally to mean figuratively now which is literally the opposite of literally, but I've literally never seen someone use literally to mean figuratively. I have often seen it used to hyperbolize the strength of analogies or generalizations, which means they apply literally somewhat figuratively, but that doesn't mean that they literally mean for literally to mean figuratively.

[TeMPOraL]

Literally is literally a point. Figuratively is a point only figuratively, literally it is a continuum. If you're not using literally to literally mean literally, you are literally using it to mean figuratively.

[dragonwriter]

No, if you aren't using it to mean literally, you are using it figuratively, but not necessarily (or ever, IME) to mean figuratively (usually as an intensifier to a statement that is expected to be understood as figurative from context.)

[marcosdumay]

People are just not literally-absolutists. They believe literally exists in a continuum.

That means they disagree with you on the definition of the word, but it doesn't make it a synonym of figuratively.

[DrammBA]

> I'm literally dead right now

Is that figurative speech?

[dllthomas]

Of course.

Would you be less likely to interpret it as such if the speaker had omitted "literally"?

I would say that the sentence is an example of hyperbole. "I am so figuratively dead right now it's as if I am literally dead." The meaning of literally, there, remains intact.

In the same way, when someone complains that you left them waiting for "days" we don't say "sometimes days means ten minutes" but that sometimes people exaggerate.

[falsaberN1]

Yes. Definitely.

If I say "I literally broke my arm" after I actually broke my arm, that use is completely correct. But you cannot be literally dead and still type a message, unless it's an automated message that you ordered someone/something to send AFTER you died.

[function_seven]

If I'm on my regular nightly haunting mission, and I decide to speak to the new owner of the house that I'm haunting, how do I convey to them that I am really, actually, truly dead? I could say, "I'm literally dead", but they would think I'm laughing at their joke they just made!

If the answer to this is to avoid the word "literally", and instead replace it with "really, actually, truly" (like I did above), then I might just decide to retire from haunting.

[falsaberN1]

You obtain "literally dead" privileges if you are a ghost, too, of course.

OMG A GOAST SO SPOOKY

[compiler-guy]

Linguists call this usage, “the emphatic literally” and the best writers of the past 300 years have used it.

So if it’s good enough for Charlotte Brontë, Jane Austen, Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, William Thackeray, Vladimir Nabokov, and David Foster Wallace, then it’s good enough for me. Literally.

https://www.thecut.com/2018/01/the-300-year-history-of-using...

[JohnFen]

I wouldn't mind that use of the word if there were a different word available that meant "literally literally".