| In the podcast I heard, he acknowledges the personal wincing he experiences over certain linguistic "errors" (i.e. deviations from prescribed usage), but comes down on the side of intelligibility--if we known what a person is trying to convey when they use "literally" to mean "deeply" or "intensely," why waste time or be rude enough to "correct" them. He sees such moves as a kind of snobbery and elitism. Whether you agree with that is entirely your business. I'd not base an entire argument on one scholar, but I also think the policing of language as is done, for example, in France to maintain a standard of "purity" is, well, silly. |
