/lit/ - Literature

Everybody stay back, I got this.

From now on literally means actually, in reality. e.g. "She literally kicked me in the nuts."

Literarily is now the word for hyperbolic statements. e.g. "She literarily kicked my balls off."

It astounds me how much difficulty some people have with the idea of polysemy

This definition has been in the Oxford English Dictionary for a while now.

This happens all the time, you might as well just accept it
>begs the question
>subconscious

Next up: bemused

>>4032979
guys, language changes over time. it's okay. go back to sleep.

>>4032990
"Literarily" sounds more like it would mean "of or relating to literature and literary pursuits."

Like literarily kicking your balls off means you both wrote critical exegeses of Iliad and hers made you look like a phuqq niqqa

>>4032995
Having two definitions that are mutually exclusive is something of a special case though, don't you think?

>>4033028
Nah, auto-antonymy isn't anything new. In many speech communities, "bad" is a less controversial example.
"Literally" just gets more flack because it takes a very common semantic change one step further. Words like "very", "really", etc. all made the transition from AssertionOfTruthValue -> EmphaticModifier. "Literally" then took that emphatic value and used it as a vehicle for hyperbole.

>>4033056
>Words like "very", "really", etc. all made the transition from AssertionOfTruthValue -> EmphaticModifier.

How far will they take it? Will it be impossible to assert the truth at some point?

Fifty years from now, an anon wearing a faded 4chanTM tshirt wanders through a crumbling library. Anon brushes the dust and grit off a faded websters dictionary and finds the definition of "literally" A single tear creates a channel through the grime on anons face as the sound of kalashnikovs and devotional One Direction hymns reach him. "one little word. . .where it all began. . ."