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The descriptivist's dilemma
(discuss.tchncs.de)
spoiler
alt text: A two panel comic. In the first panel there are two buttons labeled "I don't believe in prescriptivism" and "'Literally' cannot mean 'figuratively'". A finger hovers between the buttons. In the second panel, the finger's owner is sweating and wiping his brow, unable to decide.
“Literally” has been used to mean “figuratively” since at least the 18 th century. Descriptivists (and actual linguists) have no problem with this. It’s a hang up of people who don’t actually study language but just want to tell other people what to do to make themselves feel superior. It was used in the figurative sense by Charles Dickens, Charlotte Bronte, James Joyce, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, among many others.
James Joyce is a bad example. My man will use any word phthalatically, praxically and with attendancy to drum the nepenthe of the scouring sense held within the addled consciousness that inexorably reaches for the Cratylus — περὶ ὀνομάτων ὀρθότητος — Hades grins, his priapus rising, and farts laconically; toilets toilets all is toilets and shite to shine in the blithering morn
ChatGPT got nothing on me lad Jamie!
First, Joyce’s work varies across all of his writing, and second, you can’t pick the one author out of a list and use that to dismiss the argument. It’s basically the same as dismissing the singular “they.” It has a historical basis, and the entire meme is about descriptivism, which is based in how language is used rather than prescribing how it should be used.
yeah but I'm saying Joyce just does what he wants and im just kidding around
like take Ulysses chapter 9 (Scylla and Charybdis), lns 697–707
My joke was "was this the guy you want to use as a good example of descriptivism?!"
I think that should always have been a unique usage case, rather than a definition, though.