However, he may not be interested in talking to (or hiring) people who misuse a word and claim that the correct use is a matter of perspective.
We can be descriptive in saying that people use "literally" when they don't mean "literally" - we can also be descriptive when we label such people as ignorant of the meaning of the words they use.
> he may not be interested in talking to (or hiring) people who misuse a word and claim that the correct use is a matter of perspective.
Because that would be the worst. No one ever says something while meaning something else.
When, while sitting at the table, people ask me if I can pass them the water, I check if I can reach the bottle, I check if I'm close enough to them, then I say "yes, I can" and keep eating.
My brother did something similar growing up. In Swedish a common way to ask the time is "Vad är klockan?", literally translating to "What is the watch?". To which I got "An invention that tells the time" or some variation thereof for years...
I wonder how many languages' time-telling questions could be susceptible of a different literal interpretation.
It seems like the Spanish and Portuguese could be literally taken as "what are hours?" ("intervals of sixty minutes!") (although I don't think it would be the most idiomatic way to ask that question in either language), while one German option is "how late is it?" ("not very!").
There's another German question which could be taken as "how much clock is it?", but since clocks are usually discrete objects, it might be quite a strain to try to take this as a question about something's clock-nature. (Maybe if you were looking at Dalí's Persistence of Memory, you could answer something like "this one is not very much clock".)
That's not descriptive, that's presumptuous and elitist. How do you know they're ignorant? Maybe they know perfectly well what the word means and are using it for humorous effect, or as an extreme intensifier.
We can be descriptive in saying that people use "literally" when they don't mean "literally" - we can also be descriptive when we label such people as ignorant of the meaning of the words they use.