In A Series of Unfortunate Events, the villain repeatedly uses the word literally in a hyperbolic or exaggerated way. People listening to him are annoyed by this: No, you mean FIGURATIVELY.
No, he doesn’t! The word figuratively can’t be used to add emphasis. Hyperbolic literally means something is to be taken in the strongest admissible sense. Figuratively means… not that. Saying my head figuratively exploded isn’t any different than saying my head exploded. It reduces the emphasis, if anything.
I find people’s aversion to hyperbolic literally curious for several reasons.
First, the usage is relatively old. It’s been in use for 300 years now.
For example, Pope in 1708: Euery day with me is literally another yesterday for it is exactly the same.
Charles Dickens in 1839: ‘Lift him out,’ said Squeers, after he had literally feasted his eyes in silence upon the culprit.
The usage had finally worked its way into dictionaries in the first decade of the 1900s. I understand people being annoyed by new usages, but I’ve never understood how people choose which old, established usages to be annoyed by.
Second, the usage is an obvious logical progression from an emphatic use which is even older. For example, Dryden 1687: daily bread is litt’rally implor’d; Junius 1769: What punishment has he suffered? Literally none. In these cases, literally does not have its traditional sense of word for word; it’s just used for emphasis. The progression from emphatic to hyperbolic usages is straightforward, and can be seen with numerous other words or phrases: really, actually, in truth, in fact, in reality, etc.
Many years ago I read Roger Ebert’s review of High Tension. It said something that I remembered as: The movie has a plot hole so big that you could drive a truck through it, and it literally does. Of course this does not literally happen in the older sense; a plot hole is not something that can actually be driven through. (To top things off, the plot hole in question concerns the presence of a van, not a truck.) But I thought this usage was delightful; He took the phrase so big you could drive a truck through it and through use of the word literally signified to the reader that the plot hole involves a vehicle. I saved it in my brain as a great example of how hyperbolic literally can be used well.
Not long ago I looked it up again for the exact wording and found this, to my surprise:
I am tempted at this point to issue a Spoiler Warning and engage in discussion of several crucial events in the movie that would seem to be physically, logically and dramatically impossible, but clever viewers will be able to see for themselves that the movie's plot has a hole that is not only large enough to drive a truck through, but in fact does have a truck driven right through it.
Emphasis added. It doesn’t say literally at all! But my brain saved it as an example of hyperbolic literally because it’s used in literally the same way: Not in actual fact, but in the strongest admissible sense.
This leads to an obvious question. I have never, in my entire life, heard a single person complain about such hyperbolic use of in fact even though it is used EXACTLY the same way as literally. Why not?
As far as I can tell, the answer is that Henry Bradley back in 1903 and Henry Watson Fowler in 1922 didn’t complain about it.
If you are annoyed by hyperbolic use of literally, it is almost certainly because your surrounding culture has told you to be annoyed by it. You probably don’t care about other equivalent usages. They’ve probably never even crossed your mind.
Maybe that doesn’t bother you—after all, lots of the things we’re angry about are put on us by the surrounding culture. But this isn’t something inherently outrageous. There’s no injustice here like in so many horror stories on the news. There’s just anger for its own sake.
“But we’re losing a useful word!” is one excuse I’ve heard. Bollocks. Hyperbolic literally has been around for hundreds of years. If there is any losing to be done, it was lost a long time ago. And why this negativity, anyway? Why not see it as gaining a word? It’s not as if it’s difficult to tell when someone’s being hyperbolic. Not as if you’re going to be confused about whether someone really means something literally. If it does happen, I don’t see why that indicts all hyperbolic use of literally, rather than those few examples. Most words have more than one meaning, and it’s usually possible to create confusing sentences, but we somehow manage to stumble our way through it without constant outrage.
Reject anger for its own sake. You could stop being angry about language, and be curious instead.