>So it’s okay to use literally to mean figuratively as long as you really, really, really need to do so? Hmph.
No need for the "hmph". It's how language works. Yes, a word can indeed have not only multiple meanings but also contrasting meanings. And there's nothing wrong with that nor is there a need to be judgmental about it.
>And there's nothing wrong with that nor is there a need to be judgmental about it.
I agree that there's no need to be judgmental about it. I wouldn't fault a particular person using "literally" this way. I disagree that there's nothing wrong with this kind of language drift.
While it's nobody's fault, it makes English poorer. There are already lots of general-purpose intensifiers. English doesn't particularly need another one. The previous formal definition of "literally" was comparatively specific and fulfilled a useful role neatly and succinctly. I can't think of another single word to fulfill this role in the future.
I feel similarly with the phrase "beg the question", which in common usage now means simply "raises the question" or "invites the question". It doesn't bother me because I think people who use it this way are stupid; it bothers me because there is no synonym for "begs the question" which is equally succinct.
> I feel similarly with the phrase "beg the question", which in common usage now means simply "raises the question" or "invites the question". It doesn't bother me because I think people who use it this way are stupid; it bothers me because there is no synonym for "begs the question" which is equally succinct.
Since the original sense of "begs the question" is inherently intransitive, and the modern sense is inherently transitive (and, further, the original sense can be rationalized as an intransitive version of the modern sense where the implied object is the proposition that the argument was attempting to justify), there is no conflict between the original and modern sense, so I don't see the problem.
Also, the original sense of "begs the question" can be equivalently stated as "is a circular argument" which is nearly as succinct and uses words in something much more like there usual English senses, so even if the more modern sense of "begs the question" could create semantic ambiguity (which it can't, since its syntactically distinct), I still wouldn't agree that much useful was lost.
>While it's nobody's fault, it makes English poorer. There are already lots of general-purpose intensifiers. English doesn't particularly need another one.
I'm more than a little bothered by this line of reasoning. Spoken languages aren't like programming languages, where having many ways to express the same thing can be seen as a detriment. Having more ways for one to express oneself can only make the language richer.
In a vacuum, having another intensifier is a good thing even if it's very similar to existing intensifiers. My point was that getting another marginally useful intensifier at the expensive of a very useful clarifier makes the language less net poorer.
In other words, "literally" meaning "figuratively" means it can no longer be unambiguously used to mean "not figuratively". The latter function is more useful than the former because there are lots of existing words for the former and only a few for the latter.
Gosh, did they really use really (3 times) in a sentence about the meaning of literally and not see the irony?
For anyone else missing the point "really" doesn't necessarily mean real, "truly" doesn't necessarily mean true, "actually" doesn't necessarily mean actual, they often just add intensity to what comes after them, just like "literally".
Really is usually a no-op word. It's almost like "uh", it can really be added to sentences really almost anywhere without really changing anything or really improving anything. Really.
A quick way to improve your writing is to get in the habit of editing yourself and removing words like "really" or "truly" and either leaving them out or using a better phrasing to get across what you mean.
I encountered an interesting example of two constrasting meanings of "outstanding" in the final section of the final report of a multi-million pound research project - it ended with a bullet point list of the "oustanding" areas for the project with the intention of meaning "not settled or resolved" when in context it looked like it meant "Standing out among others of its kind; prominent.".
In the context of that project final report they were meant to mean "the things we haven't done" but it looked like it meant "the best things we have done".
Actually, not everyone agrees that that's how it works...whether society should value descriptive over prescriptive policies on its language is a huge debate among linguists. Just as programmers continue to argue over OOP vs functional, JavaScript vs CoffeeScript, etc
>whether society should value descriptive over prescriptive policies on its language is a huge debate among linguists
There's no such debate at all, whoever told you that is not a linguist.
Linguistics is a science and it is inherently descriptive. It describes what it sees in natural language. It doesn't make judgment as to the worthiness or corectness of something. That's what laymen do, but they cannot reinforce their views through linguistics, only through distortion of linguistics.
However, there are linguists working in institutions that do prescribe the proper use of language – e.g. [0] in France and [1] in Austria, Switzerland and Germany. The idea to pass laws to change spelling may appear somewhat strange to others, though…
> However, there are linguists working in institutions that do prescribe the proper use of language ...
That may be, but such behavior contradicts their supposed status as scientists, i.e. dispassionate observers of nature. Imagine a scientist in the Australian outback, yelling at a Platypus, "You're doing it all wrong!"
I think the takeaway here is that the literal meaning of "literally" is useless. If you are having a dialogue, you'd just tell people you were not speaking hyperbole, you mean exactly what you say. If you're writing, you're using the literal meaning of words anyway.
In general I'd agree. But in this case we see the sort of destruction of language George Orwell warned about. By legitimising a use of the word "literally" which is counter both to its etymology, and to the intention of talking about communication in terms of the specific meanings of the words involved, we risk making it more difficult in practice to consider the specifics of what has been said.
Unfortunately, this destruction of language is not government-mandated, as Orwell feared, but results a) from the laziness of most people and b) from the increased effects these people have on ‘upper class’ language due to thinner class boundaries and modern media.
> a word can indeed have not only multiple meanings but also contrasting meanings. And there's nothing wrong with that
Given our current course, the logical conclusion is for every word in the dictionary to be replaced with "fuck" -- we'll just repeat that one word over and over again relying on context to tell us which of the thousand meanings is the intended one.
"he's drunk" -> "fuck; Fucker's fucked"
"she needs to pay more taxes than expected" -> "Fucker's fucked. Fuckers!"
"they had sex" -> "fuckers fucked"
"the sex was amazing" -> "fucking fuck... fuck!"
This is all well and good for simplifying the writing of language, but when we reach the point of all words having overlapping and contrasting meanings and somebody writes "Fuck, fucking fuckedy fuck. Fuck?", what the fuck does that mean?
>There are far more efficient ways to flag people that fit a certain profile. They should have checked all of his belongings and let him go, and not focused at all on his "attitude".
Did you miss the part where the machines gave him a positive for explosives?
What the correlation between testing positive on one of those machines and bomb possession? How many common household chemicals test positive on one of those machines? Are we both fully informed enough on bomb detection to even have this conversation?
I'm going to assume that if they let him go eventually they could have let him go immediately (or soon) after checking all of his belongings.
Thoroughly re x-ray and hand inspect the contents of his bags. Thorough pat-down of his person. Interviewing him as they went. Upon finding nothing, send him on his way. 30 minutes tops.
>Since there's no proof of this "positive", this claim sits in doubt.
...and since there's no proof of his story, his story sits in doubt. Right?
Is that the modus operandi?
I was commenting under the assumption that his experiences were conveyed truthfully and that the explosive alert actually happened and wasn't bogus.
Is there reason for me to automatically doubt the sincerity of those who tested him?
Is there reason to believe that they didn't want to tell him what exactly the machine told them because they were lying to him? Or is it a more reasonable explanation that they're not allowed to?
Racial profiling is bad. They acted differently towards him than they'd do to other people, but that doesn't mean we have to ignore everything and assume that every single person there was out to get him and put an innocent person through hell.
> since there's no proof of his story, his story sits in doubt. Right?
Not for me. The author has more credibility in my eyes than any employee of the TSA.
> Is there reason for me to automatically doubt the sincerity of those who tested him?
Since they lied to him through the entire ordeal ("We’ll just be a few minutes, and then you’ll be able to go."), the rest of their declarations are equally suspect.
>While working at the Marienfelde Field Site in Berlin, Carney began copying classified documents which he then provided to the East German Ministry for State Security (MfS) by repeatedly crossing back and forth into East Germany. In 1984 he was involuntarily transferred to Goodfellow Air Force Base in Texas to work as a technical instructor. Unfortunately, Carney believed, Goodfellow AFB was a training base with no real-world intelligence of any interest to the MfS. He soon discovered that he had been very wrong. He continued providing the MfS with documents, meeting his handlers in Mexico City and Rio de Janeiro In 1985.
>Traditionally, Trois-Rivières was referred to in English as Three Rivers
although it then goes on to say that this is becoming less and less common.
Edit: and a completely irrelevant but somewhat interesting piece of information, the city's inhabitants are called Trifluvians. I say interesting because the fluv- part obviously comes from the other French word for river, fleuve, rather than the one used in the actual name of the city, rivièr.
See also "Ivory Coast" versus "Côte d'Ivoire" and plenty of other place names that exist in between localized and non-localized versions. Some people say "Ivory Coast" others say "Côte d'Ivoire" and others vary based on the week.
We have this in Brazilian Portuguese for some cities too. For example, saying "San Francisco" instead of "São Francisco" is fine (maybe because they sound similar?), but saying "New York" instead of "Nova Iorque" can be considered pompous in some circles.
I actually remember hearing an official from Cote d'Ivoire insisting that we should use "Cote d'Ivoire" in all languages.
People localizing their country name creates confusion, typically a citizen from Cote d'Ivoire unable to explain to an airport official where he's from because the official only knows the locally translated name.
It gets very complicated pretty quickly. You are aware that the way you pronounce "Russia" sounds completely different from the way Russians call their country, right? In fact English does not even have the proper sounds to replicate that (rolling "r" and palatalized "s" for starters).
I'm not very familiar with the Quebec language laws, but I suspect that it's actually illegal to call it "Three Rivers" on signs or advertisements within Quebec.
We sorta-kinda translate or mangle some names, don't we? I've often wondered why the English name for "München" is "Munich"... it's not even that close and doesn't mean anything in English.
The United Nations Group of Experts on Geographical Names defines:
Endonym: Name of a geographical feature in an official or well-established language occurring in that area where the feature is located.
Exonym: Name used in a specific language for a geographical feature situated outside the area where that language is spoken, and differing in its form from the name used in an official or well-established language of that area where the geographical feature is located.[2]
For example, China, India and Germany are the English exonyms corresponding to the endonyms Zhongguo, Bharat and Deutschland, respectively.
Historically us Brits were not very good at foreign names, Leghorn vs Livorno for example. In some cases though the name has changed and we use one not in current use, eg Danzig vs Gdansk. Spelling was less standardised too.
It has nothing to do with being illegal. That's just not the name of the city. Why would someone call San Francisco St-Francis on any sign, since nobody would know what it refers to?
It's fairly common for names of places, especially places of great historical importance, or areas where multiple cultures have traditionally overlapped, to have variant names in different languages.
There's nothing really odd or strange about this, and Trois-Rivières/Three Rivers is a trivial example, in which the translation is directly obvious. There are plenty of other examples that are a bit more confusing, especially where German place names are concerned; see Bratislava/Pressburg or Aix-la-Chappelle/Aachen.
Calling San Francisco "St. Francis" is strange because "San Francisco" has become the standard English name of that city, which doesn't seem to be the case for Trois-Rivières/Three Rivers - the very fact that no one ever says "St. Francis" but the author of this blog did use "Three Rivers" is evidence of this.
The number of people who would call that city Three Rivers is probably as big as the number of people who still refer to St James street in Montreal, that is, very small and dwindling.
It's probably much more likely that google translate did a literal translation of the city's name.
>It's probably much more likely that google translate did a literal translation of the city's name.
Running the article through GT shows that GT doesn't translate the name of the city. It keeps it in its original French form, both as an isolated word (just running Trois-Rivières through the translator) as well as part of the whole article.
I would think the percentage of people who don't use ATM machines and don't have a credit card is likely higher than 22%, actually. Using only cash is much more common in Europe than in the US.
This is one of those areas where you can't really generalize over "Europe" at all since it varies so much between countries. In Scandinavia, the Netherlands and the UK, card usage is extremely high. In southern and eastern Europe, not so much.
Definitely true, but Scandinavia, the Netherlands and the UK do have low level of credit card use, it's basically all debit cards, sometimes even using some local system. The Netherlands is ridiculous in this, when I was there is summer hardly anybody took Mastercard or Visa.
In all of EU, 40% of people have a credit card. You're right that it varies greatly throughout the countries.
The highest credit card per capita rate is in Luxembourg, with around 3 per capita (for comparison's sake, in the US it's 3.5 per capita, in most EU countries at 1 per capita).
The highest ownership rate is in Luxembourg, with 87% of people having one. The lowest is in Hungary, with only 9% of the people having a credit card.
Some other countries: Denmark 71%, Bulgaria 12%, Lithuania 16%, Romania 17%. The rest of the EU countries can be seen here, on page 13
I saw illiterate children using Youtube. If an adult (or link) open one of their favorite song or cartoon, then they can jump to another videos for a long time, using the thumbnail image (and sometimes a few words that they understand)
Even my 18 month old niece can use the iPad to open YouTube, click around a bit, or more likely go to the history and view her previously watched stuff and navigate around that way.
Take a look at the "depth" column. Dutch and Swedish used to be your average Wikipedias, with article counts somewhere in the ~500k. They both decided that it was more important to have a higher article count so they now employ bots to create new articles with the bare minimum of data (sentence or two, pulled from other language Wikipedias). It usually becomes more extreme when there's some sort of milestone ahead. There's even worse offenders, for example Waray-Waray.
I'm genuinely wondering whether Wikipedia should have a policy of deleting all such articles and disabling their creation. I don't think it's in the spirit of an encyclopedia.
>Dutch and Swedish used to be your average Wikipedias, with article counts somewhere in the ~500k. They both decided that it was more important to have a higher article count so they now employ bots to create new articles with the bare minimum of data (sentence or two, pulled from other language Wikipedias).
Interesting! The german wikipedia in comparison is doing the exact opposite and has very strict relevance criteria for new articles.
> I'm genuinely wondering whether Wikipedia should have a policy of deleting all such articles and disabling their creation. I don't think it's in the spirit of an encyclopedia.
Hopefully, it will soon be possible to generate such minimal articles automatically from the language-independent and structured data on Wikidata. At this point, hopefully, it will be possible to create just the stylesheets and get the data from Wikidata instead of populating small Wikipedias with bot-created articles; only the relevant work will remain (to be done on Wikidata in a language-independent way).
I still think it's good because even if it doesn't provide good info, it links you to a list of articles in other languages that does. Providing you speak more than one language, it's very useful.
Around 2006 my (German) high school teachers started to check Wikipedia articles for all essay topics they assigned. But they never checked the English or French articles. Good for me!
I remember my high school teacher's first introduction to an online encyclopedia article - we were tasked with some writing, and one of my friends had this new "Encarta" software (that was 1994 or so).
We made our homework in 15 minutes, proceeded to goof off all the afternoon, and blew away the teacher (we were intelligent enough to slightly modify it).
Once the article is created, it can appear in Google. Once it's in Google, it's more likely to have visitors and some of them might improve the article.
I have no idea whether this was the rationale or even whether it's a good idea, but there might be more to their strategy than article count.
Partially it's just a stupid race, see e.g. page in Russian Wikipedia [1], completely dedicated to discussions of the "Wikipedias race", celebrating wins over other wikis, coordinating bot article creation, blaming competitors for "unfair" low-quality bot article uploads, etc. On the other hand, batch uploads are not completely useless -- batch-uploaded article stubs have consistent style, depth and quality (something that's hard to get with crowd-sourced articles), and with script-created articles it's possible to get exhaustive consistent coverage of boring topics like rivers, insects or villages.
Regarding your suggestion: this is, after all, a decision made by the Swedish/Dutch Wikipedia community. I'm not familiar with Wikipedia's hierarchy, but I'm not sure that this is unencyclopaediac (?) enough for an outside intetvention to be a good idea.
Looking at how they calculate "depth", I would say it's just as likely measuring edit-wars. It's not evident that it's measuring quality and I don't think it should be used as a target or marker for quality.
I often find myself clicking on the Dutch translation link - it regularly has more concise, useful data.
>I often find myself clicking on the Dutch translation link - it regularly has more concise, useful data.
For content that you care about, perhaps. Not for the content that they use to raise the article count number. The latter is mostly made up of one to two sentence articles scraped from foreign Wikipedias. Oftentimes they're articles about towns in remote countries.
Here's an example of such an article created by a bot
The existence of those pages has no disadvantage and does not detract from the quality of the encyclopedia (if correct) - wikipedia itself points out that it is not a paper encyclopedia and there is no limit to the amount of content.
I do not understand the disadvantage of listing Abitanti and providing its location within Slovenia.
My point was regarding the usage of bots to scrape that content and adding it to a specific Wikipedia in an attempt to boost the article count, as has been happening on certain Wikipedias. The article that you linked to was created by an actual user.
For example, there were tens of thousands of articles created by bots on the Dutch Wikipedia, within a day, around the time when it was about to surpass the German Wikipedia. I don't consider that to be something appropriate for an encyclopedia. It's really difficult to find any alternative explanation for such acts, other than "we wanted to be ahead of that other Wikipedia in article count".
>and there is no limit to the amount of content.
WP:Stub would make it seem that it's at least not endorsed and that there's an expectation of having such articles expanded. But these don't get marked as stub, because there's no expectation of them having more content, just a mere increase on the article counter.
One huge problem with deleting or eliminating geographic records, is sooner or later something will happen there and its "a lot of work" to reinstate, especially if it was deleted by the deletionist jerks.
For example, a couple years back a dude went nuts and shot several northern WI hunters for no apparent reason. Not in Reeve but somewhere up there. Screwing around with wiki to make it harder to use and contain less information (why?) merely makes it harder to add actual real news when it later happens.
Deleting today creates a pointless load dragging down the future when it inevitably becomes notorious. Boring individual human beings might fade into obscurity, but geographic locales will inevitably "someday" be front page news for some crazy reason or another. Reeve WI will someday have its name up in lights. Maybe not today, maybe not this century...
Maybe it's just not the kind of contents I expect to find in wikipedia, and as such is just click-bait since it's likely to be high in google search results?
If I want to know the location of Abianti within Slovenia I'm more likely to turn towards some mapping website rather than wikipedia, where I'd expect a more detailed description of the city's history and other relevant information.
Many wikipedia articles have geolocations, so you're only one click away from a OSM map of the location.
And any Dutch travellers in that region will get an article about local towns suggested on their smart phones.
Finally, the wiki data project should soon (if not already) allow changes to data like population propagate from one language page to all the different versions.
In short, don't think small with wikipedia, it can be better than any Encyclopaedia in existence, possibly better than many can even imagine.
In this case, Abianti is a town (if you can call it that!) of 12 inhabitants. It's quite likely that there's no significant recorded history to it outside the heads of the dozen people living there.
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No need for the "hmph". It's how language works. Yes, a word can indeed have not only multiple meanings but also contrasting meanings. And there's nothing wrong with that nor is there a need to be judgmental about it.
It's not a particularly new meaning either
http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/002611.h...