In that context, 'literally' as figuratively makes the same sense as inflammable and flammable.

It's just one more errata in a language that's filled with horrible hacks from centuries of iterative development.

My hill to die on would be exactly one way (NOT the funky dictionary way!) of spelling words exactly as they should be pronounced and writing them back similarly.

The hill to die on part of that is they need to start with children, teach them ONLY the correct way of spelling words as use in school and stick to it. While we're at it, FFS, do metric measures conversion the same way. Cold turkey force it, and bleed in dual measures and spelling with a cutover plan that starts to make the new correct way required to be larger text by the time the grade -2 kids graduate. (So about a 14-15 year plan.) That's to give all us adults time to bash into our heads the new spellings for old words too.

Why can't it be dictionary spelling? Offhand, 1) those phonetics aren't used quite like that anywhere else. 2) those phonetics are more strongly based on the other languages in Europe so the structure isn't as expected. I'd sooner force everyone to learn how to write TUNIC's shapes... though there's some coverage issues for that.

Effectively I want different shapes for the chart ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Phonetic_Alphabe... ) that DO NOT MATCH EXISTING ENGLISH LETTERS so that when I look at a 'new spelling' my old pronunciation programmed brain doesn't index the wrong lookup table.