Literally non-literal, when literally asked about literalness

Someone on Reddit was trying to identify the fibre their yarn was made from, and someone suggested burning a bit of it since burning hair/wool has a very distinctive smell, while acrylic yarn will melt. The following conversation ensued after this burn test was carried out. 

OP: It did in fact smell like ass. 

Commenter A: I am not being sarcastic when I ask this: do you guys mean literal ass? Or does it have a specific smell thats just bad

Commenter B: They are being quite literal. Burning wool and hair smell awful. 

As further comments noted, if your literal ass literally smells of burning hair, you have issues to deal with that are more pressing than what your yarn is made of. Commenter A is clearly asking whether the smell is the same smell as that of ass: in other words, is like ass to be taken literally as meaning the same as ass. Commenter B meant something like 'The apparently extreme description of the badness of this smell is not an over-reaction; it really is very very bad and the intensifier 'literally' is appropriate here'. In other words, they meant that like ass was to be taken literally as meaning as bad as ass. 

I suppose it's not dissimilar to the phrase He works like a dog: it could mean that he is easily distracted, highly motivated by treats and responds to whistling (=the same as a dog), but more likely means that he works hard for little reward (=as much as a dog). 

German lunchtime

Sorry for the gap - marking nearly killed me but I made it out the other side. I haven't got long but I thought I'd share what I learnt in my German class today: Germans eat lunch at midday, no matter what time they eat lunch.

What?

Well, the German for 'to have lunch' is zu Mittag essen, or 'eat at midday'. I asked whether you would still say this even if you have lunch later (which I usually do), and the answer was 'well, midday is usually lunchtime' but that yes, you would say it anyway. So in my homework I have written Um 1 Uhr esse ich zu Mittag, which literally means 'at one o'clock I eat at midday'.

Physically the new literally

Usual disclaimer: while I am talking about the language use of actual people, it's in the spirit of interested observation and not at all critical, and the examples used here are made up but based on real ones.

You'll have noticed that quite a lot of people get upset about the use of literally when it's used non-literally (though, as Jesse Sheidlower notes (thanks to Stan Carey for alerting me to this) its literal use is rarely very literal).

I've recently noticed what I think might be a similar phenomenon in student assignments. They need to express something precisely and explicitly, but they lack the skills to do it quite right. For instance, we asked them to say whether a phrase some books was 'referential' in a particular sentence or not. The correct answer needed to point out that as the sentence included a past tense verb, referring to an event that had already happened at the time of utterance, there had to be certain specific books that were found and the phrase was, therefore, referential. Many of the students could see this and got basically the right answer, but didn't realise that it was the verb tense that was the thing to mention, and instead fumbled around a bit with this kind of thing:

There are some actual books that Mara physically found.

Given that this is a fictional world and a made-up sentence, this cannot be true. But you know what they mean, don't you? This is where the line blurs between actually literally literal use and actually not-very-literal use (and just look how non-actual 'actual' is nearly every time it's used).

I mentioned this on twitter and people responded with examples like this:

@StanCarey @linguist_laura ...I physically have no life.'
— John Peters (@johnthejack) April 9, 2015

@johnthejack also noted that he thought this usage began with things like I physically can't do that, where it's more or less literal but starting to have its meaning bleached, and then expanded into more and more abstract territory, as is generally the case when words change their meaning.

A quick look at a twitter snapshot from today (19th April 2015) shows that most of the time, it's used in opposition to mentally:

I'm mentally and physically exhausted

Or to refer to the body:

I'm going to paint it on you - physically on you 

Sometimes, it's emphasising that the person really does mean 'in real life' where there might be the possibility for ambiguity (which indicates that it's already well on the way to metaphorical use):

He physically hit me

Sometimes, it's referring to 'in real life' but as an exaggeration for comic effect:

It doesn't matter how cold my feet are, I'm physically incapable of wearing socks to bed. I like them to just cover my toes with heels out. (@geekhag)

There's also a lot of use of the set phrases physically sick and physically attracted to, which can be interpreted literally or with physically as an intensifier. This leads to the use of the phrase physically impossible, where it also may or may not be an intensifier.

I also noticed this nice metalinguistic comment:

My favourite is when people say things like "Physically murdered." @jake_lach)

While physically seems to me to have pretty much the same meaning as actually, there are others going through the process with slightly different effects:

@StanCarey @linguist_laura I've been seeing "legitimately" a lot...
— Adam (@pseudomonas) April 8, 2015

Stan thought this is 'typically used to stress agreement or the truth or facts about something'.

I should point out that all of these are non-academic language and so shouldn't be used in assignments, but that's another matter. I'm not saying anything more about this just now, but let it be noted and I'll keep an eye out for it, and see how it develops. Will it sneak in unnoticed, or will people start to get annoyed about it as they do with literally?

Money for old rope

Pragmatics showed up again on this week's The Apprentice. (Pragmatics shows up in all communication but you know what I mean.)

The contestants were asked to find a one-metre length of old rope. One team found a length that was 1.7m long, and were given a right good telling-off for it. Now, whether that fits the bill depends on what you want it for. Suppose you want to lower something down a one-metre drop. Then, you might ask if someone has a metre-long rope and if they have a 1.7m-long one, they'll say yes. It's enough that the rope is at least one metre long for it to be true that it is one metre long. Lord Sugar is a literal chappie, though, and if he says one metre he means one metre, no more, no less, and they were not permitted to have it.

We saw this literalness again: the teams had to find an anatomical, full-size skeleton. One team found a full-size paper skeleton, which I thought was pretty clever, but it was also disqualified, on the grounds that it made Lord Sugar look stupid I think. I suppose that a completely flat skeleton is not technically anatomically accurate.

*The title of this post is not accurate either: the team got the old rope for free so no money changed hands.