carey wrote:bwgood77 wrote:Agree with 1. Love the link for 2. Kind of crazy if there is a now another definition for the word because people didn't know how to use it, but it makes sense to put it there, since everyone usually knows the intent anyway, based on who they are talking to.
Yeah, that is a bit crazy.
It's the same with "irregardless." It was never a word. Ask people to define it and they *always* gave you the definition of regardless. People used the fake word so much they had to add it to the dictionary.
Except that isn't the case with "literally". There are two schools of thought on the word, one school of thought has always considered it acceptable. The word initially meant "to the letter", meaning to transcribe something letter by letter. It wasn't the opposite of figuratively as so many people now believe it to have been. It's been in use as an intensifier almost as long as it's been in use as the opposite of figuratively. Until the early 1900's it was generally accepted in both literary and academic circles. There are more than a few authors, academicians and linguists that would like to throttle Ambrose Bierce. He was the critic and sometimes author who first took public issue with the word (in 1909) but he and his followers did so out of ignorance rather than enlightenment.
Here is a very small list of famous authors that used literally to mean something other than the opposite of figuratively: James Joyce, Mark Twain, F Scott Fitzgerald, John Dryden, Alexander Pope, Jane Austen, James Fenimore Cooper, William Makepeace Thackeray, Charles Dickens and Henry David Thoreau. Some of those names go back to the 1600's.
