“Your protestations about ‘literally’ are literally wrong.
“Have we literally broken the English language?” asks Martha Gill in The Guardian today. The problem, such as it is, seems to be that the definition of “literally” has been updated in some dictionaries. “This might be the most unforgivable thing dictionaries have ever done,”says Samantha Rollins, anthropomorphizing bound stacks of paper, echoing the sentiments of literally 50% of Twitter. Well, let’s see about that.
It’s literally not “official”
Dictionaries do not dictate language usage, they describe it. When a dictionary adds a new word or definition to its pages, it’s because the lexicographers—those responsible for compiling dictionaries—observed it in “general use.” That is to say, a lot of people were using it that way.
You made it official, not the dictionary.
It’s literally been used that way since the 17th century
It’s not as though the lexicographers have made a mistake.
I remember seeing Mrs. Miller after one of those dreadful nights, when we had been literally rocked in our bed
Do you think anybody’s bed physically rocked in the wind in Jane Austen’s Sanditon (1817)?
But there was a change in Gatsby that was simply confounding. He literally glowed…
Am I really expected to believe that Jay Gatsby becomes a source of light in The Great Gatsby (1925)?
A fun thing to do is to search the works of well-known authors for so-called “wrong” use of language and see how many times they broke the rules. By this logic, Jane Austen was a horrible writer. So was Charles Dickens. And holy shit, have you ever read Dawkins? Can’t use “literally” correctly to save his life. Horrible, horrible writer.
Seriously, people have literally complained about this for over 100 years
Here’s what Ambrose Bierce wrote about “literally” in Write It Right, a precursor to The Devil’s Dictionary, old enough to be in the public domain:
It is bad enough to exaggerate, but to affirm the truth of the exaggeration is intolerable.
H.W. Fowler in his Dictionary of Modern Usage, published first in 1926:
We have come to such a pass with this emphasizer that where the truth would require us to insert with a strong expression “not literally, of course, but in a manner of speaking”, we do not hesitate to insert the very word we ought to be at pains to repudiate
There is literally a name for this
Linguist Arnold Zwicky calls it the Recency Illusion:
In any case, we have here another instance of the Recency Illusion, the belief that things YOU have noticed only recently are in fact recent. This is a selective attention effect. Your impressions are simply not to be trusted; you have to check the facts. Again and again — retro not, double is, speaker-oriented hopefully, split infinitives, etc. — the phenomena turn out to have been around, with some frequency, for very much longer than you think. It’s not just Kids These Days.
The truth of this, demonstrated above, is immediately clear.”