High School Reading Grades 9 10 Quiz
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On the Overuse of the Word "Literally"
Critics of contemporary English are fond of pointing to the word "literally" as evidence that the language is decaying. When a teenager announces that she "literally died" during a movie, the critics wince and reach for their dictionaries. The word, they insist, means "in a literal sense," and using it to mean the opposite is a betrayal of meaning itself.
The complaint has a certain force, but it collapses under historical inspection. Charles Dickens used "literally" as an intensifier in 1839. So did Jane Austen, Louisa May Alcott, and James Joyce. If this is decay, the decay predates the complainers by nearly two centuries. What the critics are really objecting to is not a change in the language but a change in who is heard using it. When Dickens exaggerated, he was being witty. When a fifteen-year-old does the same thing on the internet, she is being sloppy.
Languages do not decay; they shift. The word "nice" once meant "foolish." "Awful" once meant "deserving of awe." No one mourns these losses because the speakers who caused them are safely dead. The living, unfortunately, keep talking.
The author's reference to Dickens, Austen, Alcott, and Joyce primarily functions to:
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