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by lutusp 4695 days ago
> It seems one can not express the view that a dictionary made a mistake ...

But the dictionary didn't make a mistake. The word "literally" means what most people think, as well as its opposite. A dictionary's purpose is solely to report how people use words (it describes, it doesn't prescribe), and it got this use right.

> It's a judgement call, and it might just be that displaying this definition shows poor judgement.

That depends. Is this new definition out in the wild? Apparently so, in which case the listing is valid. Over at Webster's in the days of print, if a word was used with a particular meaning in ten recognized publications, it became official.
1 comments
dragonwriter 4695 days ago
> But the dictionary didn't make a mistake. The word "literally" means what most people think, as well as its opposite.

The figurative use of "literal" does not mean the opposite of the literal use (it doesn't mean "not literally (in its literal sense)", it means "as if literally (in its literal sense)".)

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lutusp 4695 days ago
Well, "figuratively" is an antonym for "literally", and this specific use of literally means figuratively. So they're opposite meanings.

http://grammar.about.com/od/words/a/literallygloss.htm

Quote: "For more than a hundred years, critics have remarked on the incoherency of using literally in a way that suggests the exact opposite of its primary sense of 'in a manner that accords with the literal sense of the words.'"

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dragonwriter 4695 days ago
> Well, "figuratively" is an antonym for "literally", and this specific use of literally means figuratively.

No, it doesn't. Its an intensifier that is used when the fact that the use is figurative is (assumed by the speaker/writer) to be clear from context. The use of "literally" is not a means of communicating the fact that the modified term is being used figuratively, it is used to convey the idea that the experience represented by the clearly-figurative use has unusual proximity to the experience that would occur were the modified term literally applicable.

Yes, lots of people say it means the exact opposite, but it doesn't, and you can't understand what people are saying when they use it if you think it does.

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