I hereby declare that the word literally has not lost its meaning, despite a rash of rumors to the contrary.
What would it even mean for a word to lose its meaning? A word can change from one meaning to another, certainly. Maybe you could argue that a word that has dropped out of usage has lost its meaning..
You hear complaints of that sort all the time, but what is being missed is the fact that language is fluid. Meanings evolve as the need arises (and there are many kinds of needs). Speakers each carry a somewhat different representation of the language in their heads, and once like-minded speakers agree on a novel usage and adapt it into their own representations, language evolves.
The debate over literally is literally nothing new. Turning to old faithful, the American Heritage dictionary:
Usage Note: For more than a hundred years, critics have remarked on the incoherency of using literally in a way that suggests the exact opposite of its primary sense of “in a manner that accords with the literal sense of the words.” In 1926, for example, H.W. Fowler cited the example “The 300,000 Unionists … will be literally thrown to the wolves.” The practice does not stem from a change in the meaning of literally itself—if it did, the word would long since have come to mean “virtually” or “figuratively”—but from a natural tendency to use the word as a general intensive, as in They had literally no help from the government on the project, where no contrast with the figurative sense of the words is intended.
So literally has been known to be a general intensive for quite some time. Why the fuss now?
Twitter is my new linguistic data collection engine, btw. Just some of the multitude of great results:
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ipodrulz: My dog is whining because I’m keeping her up! She hates it when she’s asleep and I’m not… fucking bitch – literally.14 minutes ago · Reply · View Tweet
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justinpeacock: Just finished up a great songwriting session with @davehedin and a most talented artist. She is literally exploding with creativity. Hol …16 minutes ago · Reply · View Tweet
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prasannathani: @int23 omg… I’m soo sorry… speechless, literally.
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himanshuc: RT @anupkaphle: Here’s a BBC video on my dark country. I mean literally dark: http://is.gd/huEx (expand)19 minutes ago · Reply · View Tweet
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anupkaphle: Here’s a BBC video on my dark country. I mean literally dark: http://is.gd/huEx (expand)22 minutes ago · Reply · View Tweet
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jandthecity: ugh this new knitting project has been restarted literally 11 times. :( I hope it turns out the way I want it to!!27 minutes ago · Reply · View Tweet
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TurboFool: The WTF Blanket: http://is.gd/hhGX- (expand) I was literally laughing out loud by the end of this one.27 minutes ago · Reply · View Tweet
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Charpie: Holy shit. The Fort is on fire! Not literally. I know you fuckers think i’m a pyro.27 minutes ago · Reply · View Tweet
)References
Dictionary.com, “literally,” in The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition. Source location: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2004. http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/literally. Available: http://dictionary.reference.com. Accessed: January 27, 2009.
Have you seen this entire blog devoted to misuse of the word “literally”?
http://literally.barelyfitz.com/
I hadn’t, thanks for the link.
That’s definitely seems like the worst offender, but at least they do it with humor. I am a little surprised there’s a linguist behind it. My linguistics classes were the reason I changed my views on things like this. I used to be in the “correct usage of English” enforcer camp.
The problem is, of course, who says it’s correct?
Yes it literally still has at least two meanings! I don’t think it will ever lose meaning per se, but it might undergo some more semantic shift towards its reading as an intensifier. Ah, what I could do with a really big corpus! What is this “google” thing, anyway?
Just located this post due to a vanity search. Love the purpose, as this is a word that bothers me quite frequently. I found your use of my tweet rather interesting, though, as I don’t use the word lightly, and meant it in that circumstance quite, well, literally. I actually laughed out loud as opposed to what “lol” has morphed into over the years. This would be in comparison to justinpeacock’s friend whose talent is apparently dangerously explosive.
Fair enough. Those tweets were just a data dump of the twitter search for literally at the time, meant to demonstrate the wide range of uses for the word at the moment.
And that’s what I assumed. It is interesting how wide the usage is within that short block of time on a network such as Twitter. I think you got a good sampling of almost every use, including the wide range from accurate to absurd. Either way, my comment wasn’t meant to chastise you for the inclusion, but merely to point out that there are a few of us out there who try to choose our words and grammar very, very carefully. And I’m sure you know just how tricky that can be within the 140-character Twitter limits.