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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   36912 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 22, 2024

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The use of "literally" for emphasis annoys me. So does saying "everyone" when you mean "most people", or "literally no-one" when you mean "almost no-one". Oddly, I find that even here where most people have above-average verbal skills, I see this quite often.

Using "everyone" to mean "the overwhelming majority of people" is fine, as it's usually obvious that the person is speaking figuratively for emphasis (although Eliezer noted years ago that this can quickly shade into a value judgement and appeal to conformity). Likewise "literally everyone has a torso of some description" - the qualifier "literally" indicates that the statement is not intended to be taken figuratively - the statement means exactly what it appears to mean on its face. What's not okay is "literally everyone thinks Kamala is the superior candidate".

It's called hyperbole. Everyone knows what those words literally mean, which is why using them figuratively creates emphasis. It's not a lack of verbal skills, in fact it takes verbal skills to be able to encode and decode the hyperbole.

It may be called hyperbole, but it isn't. Look at how it works

Contrast the example from up thread

I've mostly gone from being a pedant to finding great amusement in deliberately provoking pedants and watching their heads literally explode.

with this alternative

I've mostly gone from being a pedant to finding great amusement in deliberately provoking pedants and watching them become literally annoyed.

It doesn't work as emphasis because "annoyed" is not itself hyperbole so asserting the literal truth of it falls flat. Had one written hyperbolically

I've mostly gone from being a pedant to finding great amusement in deliberately provoking pedants and watching their heads explode.

then one can add shock value with literally, until your listener realizes that you are piling hyperbole on top of hyperbole, literally double hyperbole. Eventually listeners identify the figurative use of the word "literally" as a double hyperbole. Then they think the figurative use is like telling a joke, and then when nobody laughs, repeating it, but louder.

The problem is that hyperbole can eat a word. It ate "very", "truly" and "really". All of those words originally meant "this is not hyperbole; this happened in reality" - look at the etymology. Rampant hyperbole destroyed that meaning, and now the hyperbolic meaning is considered the normal one. Now we have to use three syllables if we want to indicate a lack of hyperbole - "actually" or "literally". If we lose those, we'll have to use more than three.

We need a word of reasonable length to signify "I am on simulacrum level 1; this is truth"; this is a very-important concept. Hyperbole, ironically, has a strong tendency to eat such words. The only viable solution seems to be exactly the kind of opprobrium that you're decrying; shame people for using these words as hyperbole.

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