But that's not what this entry is about. It's about something much more widespread and insidious.
Word definitions are tricky. Over time, they migrate. For instance, in Hamlet (and in general, circa Shakespeare's time), the word "doubt" had the meaning we now give to "suspect." And in a work from the Seventeenth Century that I've been reading, "sad" just means "solemn." These things happen.
Sometimes it's OK if a word drifts from its dictionary meaning. Example: for the hardest-core grammar nazis, "hopefully" only means "full of hope." As in, "She waited hopefully by the phone." Its casual use has clearly moved away from that, meaning "one would hope that...", and I think that's fine. There's no other word that fills the niche of casual "hopefully."
However I will not, nay, CANNOT, stand idly by while people continue to use "literally" wrong. It's supposed to mean "this is the pure truth, it is unvarnished and without hyperbole. It may sound like I'm exaggerating, but I want to emphasize that I am not." No other word does that! Yet people insist on using "literally" just like every other word that can be used to emphasize. They use it like "very" or "really" or "totally" (which, when you look at them, have clearly also been through the same semantic bleaching). They use it to hyperbolize, when that is the opposite of what it's for. When people "literally" to mean "metaphorically," they are killing the word "literally." We already have lots of words that just emphasize and exaggerate. We don't need more of those. We need "literally" to mean "literally," because if "literally" doesn't do its specific job, nothing else will.
Stand with me! We must refuse to succumb to the temptation to use "literally" when we aren't talking about something that really, genuinely, truly, honest-to-goodness happened!
