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Simple Grammar

fair enough

"I know right? I mean, the lack of a Roman alphabet on this keyboard really pisses me off sometimes..."
 
No. There are leet speak translators but not to that disturbing extent, at least as far as I know.
 
I thought it was Welsh. :/

Edit: OK, sorry, bored at 4am. My posts in this thread have declined slightly in quality since I co-wrote the OP.
 
To get the longer dash in Mac OSX, hold Option (Alt) and press the shorter dash.

Eh, didn't read the whole topic, but thought that might be helpful to other Mac users. Add it in, please?
 
Also, can we teach people what literally means? It's disturbing how often I hear a girl say, "I literally died!"

Or a guy say, "I literally crapped myself!"
 
jaketiger1116 said:
Also, can we teach people what literally means? It's disturbing how often I hear a girl say, "I literally died!"

Or a guy say, "I literally crapped myself!"
Click to expand...
well they're technically not using it incorrectly; they're exaggerating and you know they're exaggerating, thus there's no ambiguity. you wouldn't get mad at someone saying 'the fish was as big as my car!!' or 'I was this close to punching the guy' would you?
 
Oh yeah, Affect and Effect, when people screw those two up it gets on my nerves...normally what I see is the lack of affect used at all, and people just always using effect.
 
One of the things that bug me the most is loose and lose. One is to set something free or to have something not firmly fixed in place, and the other is ceasing to have something.
 
ultraviolet said:
well they're technically not using it incorrectly; they're exaggerating and you know they're exaggerating, thus there's no ambiguity. you wouldn't get mad at someone saying 'the fish was as big as my car!!' or 'I was this close to punching the guy' would you?
Click to expand...

People often don't mean to exaggerate what they're saying in that way when they (mis)use 'literally'. One could, yes, use literally to mean 'really' if one was aware of the actual definition, but most of the time people saying 'I was literally going to kill him' aren't quite that informed, in my experience. They're not technically incorrect, but they often don't know why or even that they were close in the first place.
 
Blastoise Fortooate said:
People often don't mean to exaggerate what they're saying in that way when they (mis)use 'literally'. One could, yes, use literally to mean 'really' if one was aware of the actual definition, but most of the time people saying 'I was literally going to kill him' aren't quite that informed, in my experience. They're not technically incorrect, but they often don't know why or even that they were close in the first place.
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Honestly? If someone's saying 'I was literally going to kill him' and you know better that they weren't going to actually kill him, they're exaggerating. That's what exaggeration is. "[I was so angry/frustrated/upset/whatever that] I was literally going to kill him" is exaggerating; it's exaggerating how angry or whatever they are. I think people do actually mean to exaggerate when they say things like 'literally', because if you say "What? You were going to kill him?!" they'll say something like "well no okay I wasn't actually going to kill him but I was so angry with him etc". Nobody is actually going to get killed here. You know that and they know that, so what's the problem?

It's a figurative expression, anyway; saying "I was literally going to kill him!" is a figure of speech, it's symbolic of how angry/whatever they were, and it's an exaggeration. Nobody is actually under the impression that someone's going to get killed here. They're not misusing 'literally', or if they are, they're misusing language the same way as when people say "It moved as fast as greased lightning!" or "This is the most glorious thing I have ever seen in my entire life". None of these things are actually true, and none of these words are actually being misused in this context. Everything makes sense and it's non-ambiguous, so what's the problem?

I think it's more that 'literally' is frequently used by teenagers all the time and people are just sick of hearing it, so they're getting all grammarian so they can make these people feel stupid and stop saying it, which is actually the worst.
 
My point is that people who say 'literally' a lot often do not know its actual meaning. Of course they're exaggerating, but they don't know the meaning of the word that they're using to do it. They substitute 'very' or 'really' with 'literally' without understanding the actual meaning of the word. I'm not (trying to) imply that these people aren't joking, but that they don't know the word that they're using.

It's not really a big deal, honestly, but then much of grammar isn't.
 
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