The 300-Year History of Using ‘Literally’ Figuratively

SCIENCE OF US
JAN. 29, 2018

By Kory Stamper

An East Village bar recently got attention for its supposed ban on patrons who misuse the word “literally.”
As a lexicographer, I pay close attention to the latest linguistic scuttlebutt to erupt on social media. Last week introduced me to the Continental bar in the East Village, and owner Trigger Smith’s screed against “literally”:

Link to tweet

Folks love a good linguistic peeve, and the figurative or emphatic “literally” is a fan favorite. It’s practically a rite of new-media passage to write a piece dismissing “literally,” and when someone discovered in 2013 that most American dictionaries entered a sense for “literally” that covered its figurative uses, lexicographers were inundated with angry emails and phone calls. Smith detailed his antipathy to Grub Street, and many emphatic “literally” naysayers likely nodded in agreement. “Since it’s English, it’s probably happening in England, and maybe Australia […] I had a woman from Miami the other night tell me it’s happening down there,” he says. “And it’s not just millennials. Now you hear newscasters using ‘literally’ every three minutes on the Sunday news shows.”

The emphatic “literally” is not a millennial invention; it goes back to the 1700s at least, though Smith gets it right that it’s English. John Dryden, a man who is best known as the founder of literary criticism and the prohibition against the terminal preposition, was an early user of the emphatic “literally.” Charlotte Brontë, Jane Austen, Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, William Thackeray, Vladimir Nabokov, and David Foster Wallace all used the emphatic “literally” in their works. Even Lindley Murray, 19th-century grammarian, uses the hyperbolic “literally” in his own grammar — and he was such a peever that he thought children, along with animals, shouldn’t be referred to with the pronoun “who,” as “who” conveys personhood, and only creatures with the ability to be rational are actually people.

We only began to take issue with the hyperbolic “literally” in the early 20th century. Ambrose Bierce called it “intolerable,” and usage maven H. W. Fowler said it should be “repudiated.” Dislike of the emphatic “literally” has become so prevalent that the word routinely shows up on lists of words that should be banned. Google Chrome users in particular no longer need suffer; they can download an extension for their browser that changes every instance of “literally” to “figuratively.”

...