Are you afraid for the expressiveness of future English speakers? Fear not, if the word 'literally' no longer had its meaning we'd make a new one to take its place.

The problem is, if I want to use the term "literally" in a literal sense now, nobody will recognize its literal meaning, and everybody will assume it's being used metaphorically. You literally can't use "literally" in the literal sense of the term anymore.

Unfortunately, this very particular pair of meanings is always going to be sabotaged by hyperbole. Not the words, but the actual meanings.

Whatever word we have for "this is [truthfully] [adjective]", they're always going to use the word for "truthful" to give something added punch. Specifically in the sense of suggesting a quality has become so extreme that the metaphor is no longer an exaggeration.

Part of it is we humans just love metaphors come to life. Godzilla "literally" was taller than a skyscraper. Superman "literally" was stronger than a freight train. Tolkien was disappointed enough as a kid in Dunsinane forest "coming to life and walking" (by a bunch of men chopping off branches for camouflage, in MacBeth), that he wanted to do a story where the trees literally walked, without any metaphorical fine print.

Frankly, too bad. There is no meaningful resistance to this change in language. You can't use the word "awesome" to mean "deeply terrifying" in almost any context anymore and that is okay.

That is okay because you can use the phrase “deeply terrifying”. Languages change in general. I’m fine with that.

This specific change literally has had me pacing back and forth in distress before.

Then use the word nonfiguratively instead of literally.

> I’m envious

Well I’m also getting divorced, for reasons that aren’t entirely unrelated to literal communication.

That's more paceworthy I'd say, at least compared to the natural evolution of language continuing as it has for all of recorded history.

I’m not objecting to the natural evolution of language in general. I’m objecting to the specific loss of the word “literally”.

So you're objecting to the natural evolution of language.

Couldn't you say "in the literal sense"? Until the word treadmill claims that too of course.

Meanwhile, natural language isn't formal language, and people understand meanings of statements just as much as they did yesterday.

If people raise objections, that suggests that they are having issues with understanding. I know I've been confused by it before, and I usually feel compelled to use modifiers to distinguish between 'literally millions' and 'actually, no-exaggeration, literally millions' when I want to be understood.

That doesn't necessarily mean we're moving in the wrong direction. Language evolves to satisfy speakers' criteria, so it will gradually improve median utility. But any change is going to have cost, and confusion could be the price we pay for progress.

Alternately, you can imagine a situation where 1% of the population derives a huge amount of utility from a word, while 99% only get a small benefit from another definition. Improvements to the median in that scenario can have negative consequences in aggregate. Or you can see that this particular usage has been confusing people for a hundred years, and the cost of change may outweigh any potential benefit.

I think the position that natural language will just take care of itself is just a touch hand-wavey. Human interests and linguistic-evolutionary movement are often coaligned, but sometimes diverge- the same as with human interests and economic growth.

> I think the position that natural language will just take care of itself is just a touch hand-wavey.

Why not? It's done just that for countless millenia. Cavemen without Ph.D.'s in linguistics managed to develop languages for communication just fine.

Now, they could be further optimized, sure. But the default of taking no conscious action at all has historically worked out just fine for linguistic evolution.

In the last half of the last millenium, we achieved widespread literacy, invented the printing press, made publishing available to the public, and invented the internet. I don't think we can assume the process that worked before this tech will definitely work now.

On reflection, I'd like to retract this. I was reading quickly and didn't understand what I was replying to.

It is not my belief that, left to its own devices, natural language will become unusable. It is probably true that we can get away with letting nature run its course. I do object to using this as an argument for avoiding optimization, but I don't think I'm in disagreement with the parent there. Apologies for my error.

> and people understand meanings of statements just as much as they did yesterday.

This is the underlying source of my distress: the fear that my ability to understand and be understood by people will remain as it is.

The new word is "deadass", and the problem is solved.

That ship has sailed. This usage dates back to the time of Dickens, Brontë, Joyce, etc [1]:

As Dan Smith has pointed out in his reply to my comment on Mike Ruiz's answer, this usage crossed over into general acceptability quite a while ago, having been employed in works by Charles Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, William Makepeace Thackeray, James Joyce and Thomas Hardy, and so on. What might be happening is sort of a "resistance" against this meaning of literally, which people are starting to believe should mean something closer to what it originally did.

[1] https://www.quora.com/How-did-the-term-literally-come-to-mea...

Sean Hou's answer in that Quora thread is the correct one. The word "literally" never means "figuratively" or "hyperbolically", but it can (like any other word) be used figuratively or hyperbolically. By analogy, someone can dishonestly say "Honestly, I didn't do it," when they did. This doesn't change the meaning of the word "honestly". There are no words in English that cannot be used in a lie, and neither are there any words that cannot be used in hyperbole or metaphor. You can, if you like, dislike hyperbole (I dislike dishonesty!) but there is no use worrying about the meaning of the word.

> The word "literally" never means "figuratively" or "hyperbolically"

Yes it does. The dictionaries have added the second figurative meaning:

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/literally

The word ‘literally’ is often used figuratively. That is not the same thing as the word meaning ‘figuratively’ in those cases.

They are wrong. Native speakers just don't use definition 2 in a literal way. Maybe this usage will evolve (now that the dictionaries are wrong) but it doesn't explain any of the common usage.

> Native speakers just don't use definition 2 in a literal way.

Unclear if you meant some kind of irony by using "literal" here, but as a native English speaker I can assure you the second meaning ("used in an exaggerated way to emphasize a statement or description that is not literally true or possible") is frequently used.

Try a twitter search for something like "literally turn the world upside down": https://twitter.com/search?q=literally%20turn%20the%20world%...

Plenty of the people using it are native English speakers and (literally!) using the exact phrase in the dictionary in the way they describe.

This usage is indeed very common, but it is always meant and understood hyperbolically, and the meaning of the word relied on by the hyperbole is just M-W's sense 1.

To see this, remove the word "literally" from such a sentence. You are generally left with a statement that is still hyperbole or metaphor and not literally true. Which word are you going to redefine in a sentence like "It turned the world upside down." to enable you to interpret it literally? If you understand it as hyperbole, why does adding the word "literally" require any special meaning for that word?

Conversely, if you believe that the word "literally" literally can mean "not literally", in the same way that, say, "cleave" is an auto-antonym, it would authorize statements like

  (*) When you use metaphor, you are speaking literally.
  (*) What I said was the plain truth, but John took it literally.

which I think you will agree are not standard usage.

Moreover, if you replace the word "literally" in a sentence like

  "It literally turned the world upside down."

with something that means "not literally", like

  "It figuratively turned the world upside down."

it changes the meaning. The first sentence is hyperbole and the second is awkwardly literal.

I understand the desire of lexicographers to document this usage, which is as you say common (and legitimate) and seems to confuse people, but it's just not a different meaning of the word.

Interestingly, there is actually a long history of literally switching back and forth between its original meaning and "figuratively" over the ages. My fiance did his thesis on it!

„He literally did his thesis on it!“ There, FTFY

That’s amazing. I would like to read the abstract

'Nonfiguratively' would work.

and in our era, "disfiguratively", "unfiguratively" and "infiguratively" would likely make an appearance ...

I do not believe that it does.

Literally is used to distinguish figurative speech from literal speech, while verbatim is used to distinguish exact wording from paraphrasing.

For example, if I had temporarily lost my voice and couldn't talk, and someone texted "want to call", if I replied "I can't talk right now", they would assume I meant I was busy, but if I replied "I literally can't talk right now", that would accurately convey that I was in situation where talking wasn't possible, not merely busy. "I verbatim can't talk right now" is nonsense.

metaphorically. I assume no geese were killed in that comment

it's literally killing the metaphorical golden goose