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This question

"Literally" and "Decimate" misuse

addresses the misuse of the word "literally" to mean its opposite. I am curious as to how prevalent is such misuse. My hunch is that we are all so attuned to spotting incorrect usages that we over-estimate the frequency of misuse and overstate the threat of the word literally losing its meaning.

How I might go about calculating the ratio of correct usage to incorrect usage?

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Kevin Lawrence
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    I wouldn't bother. 'Literally' has been used to mean ‘virtually, as good as; completely, utterly, absolutely’ for over 200 years. – Barrie England Sep 12 '12 at 20:13
  • Not Constructive. If OP wants to publicise his "incorrect usage" position (peevish and pedantic imho), let him post an answer or comment on the original question. – FumbleFingers Sep 12 '12 at 20:21
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    Literally all the time. – SevenSidedDie Sep 12 '12 at 20:24
  • I suspect that calculating the ratio in any way other than manually would be very difficult, if not impossible. Consider the two sentences, "He was literally seven feet tall," and "He was literally ten feet tall." Other than knowing how tall people usually are, there is no way to disambiguate the intended meaning of the word "literally". So, to find the answer, you would probably just have to go to something like the COCA, find the instances of "literally", tag the usages, and compare the numbers in each group. – Cameron Sep 12 '12 at 20:38
  • I don't quite get why the question is not constructive. I understand that it's a difficult question and that finding the answer might be challenging but it's an empirical question and I am not looking for a debate. I am looking for facts, references and specific expertise. – Kevin Lawrence Sep 12 '12 at 21:35
  • I think the reason that is it is not constructive (and you wouldn't know this in asking the question so it is not your doing) is that there is no coherent answer, at least none known or knowable with current technology. It's like asking "What am I thinking right now?". It might be answerable eventually with good fMRI, but at the moment it turns out to be kinda impossible. i.e. you're looking for facts, there might be some but everyone here is saying ther are currently no way to even some close to facts. – Mitch Sep 12 '12 at 21:53
  • Amusing: http://www.parryphernalia.com/?page_id=1001 – Jim Sep 13 '12 at 00:56
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    Kevin, I voted to close as 'off topic', not as 'not constructive', since the question is more about how to do English research (you obviously already understand the nuances of the usage). When voting to close, I recommended that it be moved to the meta site, where I think people could give you some better insight on how to answer this question. I disagree with the 'not constructive' voters here (though I can see the rationale, given that the question would be so hard to answer). – Cameron Sep 13 '12 at 17:12
  • Does Randall frequent EL&U http://xkcd.com/1108/ ? The timing is interesting. – Kevin Lawrence Sep 14 '12 at 18:00
  • I wonder if FumbleFingers' (wrong) guess at my motives informed his decision to vote to close this question. I interpret the vote to close as a suggestion that EL&U is not interested in difficult questions. Am I right? – Kevin Lawrence Sep 14 '12 at 18:03
  • @KevinLawrence I voted "Off Topic, belongs on Meta" because this is an interesting question, but it's not a question about English but rather a question about research. – Mr. Shiny and New 安宇 Sep 17 '12 at 02:29

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Calculating with text is not too difficult if the patterns you care about have small sets of predetermined examples. For example you can compare how common the phrase 'first come first served' is in relation to 'first come first serve' in Google NGrams, because you are looking for exact text.

A semantic question, like testing for metaphorical usage can be difficult because the possibilities are open ended. For the word 'literally' what are the possible words around it that would signify that it is being used figuratively (rather than literally)? I'm sure we could come up with something, but we'd never really know what we haven't thought of that might be contexts implying figurative usage.

James Waldby - jwpat7
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Mitch
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  • I'm provisionally accepting this answer but it has given me some ideas as to how I might answer the question for myself by sampling. I hope to be back with a better answer. – Kevin Lawrence Sep 12 '12 at 21:30