Eggcorn Forum

Often they’re using ‘literally’ when they mean ‘virtually’. I wonder if this is to do with how ‘virtual’ has been taken to mean ‘simulation’ as in ‘virtual reality’.

I’ve wondered about this myself. How does literally come to mean two opposite things? Saying “it was literally X” can mean both “exactly X” and “a completely exaggerated version of X”.
Learning French, I was confused by a presence of something similar. The word “personne” can mean “a person”, or it can be used in a negative construction to mean “no one”. The word “plus” can mean “more” or “none” (although in Canadian French at least, these two are often pronounced in distinct ways).
Do we have other examples of this? How common is it for a word to have opposing meanings?

I once took a class about the processing of fruits after harvest—the class was great, but getting some of the terminology straight drove me a bit nuts. Words like “seeded” and “pitted” could be problematic. If you go to the store and buy “seeded grapes,” they’ll typically have seeds in them. If you buy “seeded raisins,” they won’t. That sounds contradictory, but seeded raisins are made from seeded grapes (i.e., grapes with seeds—like Muscats)—and the seeds are then removed at some point during the process. “Seedless raisins,” by contrast, are made from grapes that don’t have seeds to begin with.

Those two “seededs” seem to be different in origin. The “seeded” in “seeded grape” is an adjective like “many-splendored”—it’s derived from a noun, in this case “seed.” The “seeded” in “seeded raisin” is a participial adjective derived from the verb “to seed,” meaning to remove seeds.

And then there’s the fact that “seeding a field” means adding seeds, while “seeding raisins” means removing seeds. Gotta love this language.