So why has literally taken off like wildfire literally everywhere in the English speaking world? I think I'm on to something.
I haven't noticed any increase in use of the adverb. Its almost-always
incorrect usage has long been annoying to me. Its misuse seems ridiculously high among
talk-radio hosts and
sports announcers, e.g. [
*]:
• "Trump was
literally on fire for his campaign speech last night!"
• "Hillary was
literally dead after her last campaign stop yesterday."
• "The winning touchdown pass was
literally a miracle!"[‡]
• "The tight end
literally killed the safety on that touchdown play!"
One might think they, of all people, would eventually
learn its
correct usage, because it's a
professional issue of developing specific on-the-air skills: Saying what they mean, and meaning
literally (
ahem!) what they say. But long ago, I conditioned my brain to detect the error then quickly stifle my exasperation, and resume listening.
I think for so many people, the word means, "Really, actually, come on, I mean it, I'm not joking, it's true, true for everyone, objectively true" all at once.
I disagree
completely. My conclusion, reached many years ago, is that the typical misuser believes that "
literally" means "in
literary wording", which the speaker (or writer) does understand to be contrary to
objective reality. So to its typical misuser, the subject word mistakenly means means "
figuratively", and typically "
metaphorically".
It's really an example of the increasing
ignorance, by native speakers of English, of their own
mother tongue [†]. Given that vanishingly few people in the U.S.A. take classes in Latin nowadays, the typical misuser would never have encountered
"littera, -ae" (f.) as meaning a "
letter of the
alphabet" (e.g.,
per Cicero). I'd hoped to find a derivative adverb nearly identical to
"litteralis, -e -is", meaning "word-by-word", but that word is not attested until Late Latin. The same meaning is provided for Classical Latin by the 2nd of 3 attested meanings for
"litterātē" (English kept more-or-less only its 3rd meaning, which is translated as "learnedly"; the 1st meaning is translated as "legibly", in the sense of writing in well-formed letters).
-------
Note
*:
Ad hoc simulated quotes. That confessed, I'd be really surprised if
CathInfo readers who listen to radio or t.v. (especially those who indulge themselves with worldly coverage of specific sports) haven't heard nearly identical words from the mouths of radio hosts or sports announcers.
Note ‡: But
wait! Traditio Network insists that there are no more genuinely Catholic colleges (or universities) left in the U.S.A., so whose team could possibly have qualified nowadays to have been granted such a miracle?
Note †: Thus seemingly an excellent candidate for <
https://www.cathinfo.com/fighting-errors-in-the-modern-world/>, altho' it's certainly the p
rerogative of the owner-moderator to disagree.