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At 6:11 PM +0100 7/23/02, Steve Lawson wrote:
>My personal bug-bear at the moment is people who say 'literally'
>when they mean exactly the opposite
I think most people don't even think about what words literally mean;
they just mimic what they hear other people say. Even those who give
some thought to the matter generally do so by assumption rather than
actual knowledge.
To me, "literally" means "to the letter" = "in actual fact." I
suspect that many people think it means "fictionally" or "as if it
were found in literature."
This unthinking apery (to use a neologism) is rife. One of my
particular disfavorites (another neologism?) is "far and few
between." WTFDTM?!
Of course in many cases such misusages can be amusing. Who among you
remembers Mrs. Malaprop? Or Reverend Spooner? I'm frequently torn
between pedantically correcting people for their verbal mayhem and
letting it go as a lost cause (scattering metaphors as I may).
The watershed between amusement and annoyance is the degree of
penetration of the verbal gaffe in question. If one person says
something such as "George W. Bush is arguably a dimwit" it is easy to
dismiss him/her (not Dubya) as an uneducated (but possibly
perceptive) peon. When ten people misuse "arguably" in this fashion
it begins to become distressing, but when the entire English-speaking
world does so it has to be filed in the lost cause bin. I do,
however, sometimes use "arguable" with its traditional meaning just
to confuse the hoi polloi.
For those interested in such things, since 1976 Lake Superior State
University has published an annual list of mis- or over-used words
and phrases that are recommended for banishment:
http://www.lssu.edu/banished/
A few examples:
at this point in time (1976)
do-able (1980)
mandate (1985)
best kept secret (1990)
liberal (1995)
millennium (2000)
negative growth (2001)
disenfranchise (2002)
My personal suggestion for the 2003 list is "at the end of the day."
--
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Richard Zvonar, PhD
(818) 788-2202
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