I love that I can count on everyone here to be debating punctuation. Literally.

My pet peeve is 'their.' I had a student rant in class the other day, "Why do teachers hate it when students use 'their' for the third person gender neutral? Why don't teachers just accept it already?!?" My answer was that most people aren't gender neutral, they are gender something, and I was tired of reading papers with sentences like: "A pregnant woman should talk to their doctor about..." @@

One of my friends in college reasoned that it was the "royal they."

My answer was that most people aren't gender neutral, they are gender something

But we still need a word! There are plenty of times you don't know a gender, and you'd be being either inaccurate or rude by picking one.

Also, isn't it a long-time usage of it as gender neutral?

So no one's using "literal" to mean "figurative", they're just implying figurative every time.

Wait. I really think the second half of your sentence disproves the first half. If they're implying figurative-ness, then they *are* using "literal" to mean "figurative."

You left out the part where I shake my cane menacingly at the new kid.

No, I expect by that point in the future you'll be cyborgishly melded to a Segway to get around. Sort of a crabby, grammar correcting, prescriptivist Segway Centaur.

If they're implying figurative-ness, then they *are* using "literal" to mean "figurative."

I'm with Steph. Figurativeness is implied in the statement "it was hell inside that raincoat". By adding literally, you're saying "I know you would normally take that as a metaphor, but I truly mean what I said.

There are plenty of times you don't know a gender, and you'd be being either inaccurate or rude by picking one.

While I am sure there are exceptions, any time when you don't know an actual gender, you aren't talking about an actual person but a kind of general 'one' (as in 'the reader' or 'the patient'), in which case you can just make your subject plural ('readers' or 'patients') and be politically and grammatically correct at the same time.

Wait. I really think the second half of your sentence disproves the first half. If they're implying figurative-ness, then they *are* using "literal" to mean "figurative."

No. What I mean is that you can't misuse literal in that way without implying figurative. But there are lots of words you can use that imply figurative that aren't equivalent to it. Their primary meaning is something else. I posit that the misuse of literal is one of those.

be politically and grammatically correct at the same time

So you're saying it's grammatically incorrect too? I've read positions that go both ways. If I don't know the gender of the doctor, are you telling me to reframe the sentence so that I don't need pronouns because English has nothing to offer me? Do you support, then, the introduction of zie and hir and all those, or do you just figure we should say it some other way?

But there are lots of words you can use that imply figurative that aren't equivalent to it. Their primary meaning is something else. I posit that the misuse of literal is one of those.

I'm really confused here. The primary meaning of "literal" is not "figurative." But it's misused to mean "figurative." I thought we weren't initally agreeing but now I think we are?

Totally confused.

No, what I'm saying (really badly) is that when I misuse "literally" I'm not using it as an equivalent to "figuratively".

Which is to say, when I said "it's literally hell in that raincoat" I couldn't have equivalently said "it's figuratively hell in that raincoat". It's not a one for one substitution. However, every time I misuse literally, I am indeed implying figuratively. However, I'm implying figuratively with a whole lot of words that don't actually just mean that.

If what you initially meant was that you can't misuse literally without implying its opposite as well (even though that's not the main point of the misuse), then we agree.