Agema said:
Palindromemordnilap said:
You're in the line so you are in line. On line makes no sense unless there is an actual line on the floor that you are standing on. We need to tighten up our literacy people, it's slips like this that gave us "could care less"!
Or how people use "literally" to mean literally the opposite of "literally" - now so prevalent the dictionary has accepted the new usage. And let's face it, proper apostrophe usage collapsed years and years ago: "Sausage's - 65p"... uh-huh.
I have to disagree about 'literally'; no one has
ever used it to mean 'figuratively'. Literally no one.
Figuratively no one. They do not mean 'figuratively'; they literally mean 'literally'. This use of 'literally' is just an example of exaggeration in an unusual dimension-- that of literal vs. figurative.
It is somewhat like people using 'objective' to describe some deeply felt moral truth. Yeah, sure, such is not correctly described as 'objective'. But they don't
mean subjective by 'objective'; they really mean 'objective'. More to the point, and to get around the issue of some people just being
wrong about metaethics,
I really mean 'objective' when I ironically say that someone is objectively wrong about some matter of opinion even when I know that's impossible; it's not like I'd bother mentioning the subjectivity of my own judgment of their incorrectness: the whole point of saying that they are
objectively wrong is for
emphasis.
It's an exaggeration; it's saying that some moral intuition is close enough to "shouldn't ever be controversial" to transcend the distinction between is and ought. If it were simply subjective and in a category that is generally thought of as subjective, it wouldn't be worth mentioning that it was subjective. If a plainly absurd or highly unlikely to be literally true expression were simply figurative, it wouldn't be worth mentioning that it was figurative. People must mean 'literally' when they say 'literally' in cases where the statement they are making is plainly figurative; putting 'figurative' in its place completely changes the meaning of the statement: robs it of all impact.
I figuratively exploded. *yawn* *snooze*
I literally exploded. *cold water on face*
Such uses of 'literally' we might call a species of performative error.