The only linguistic argument I can still pose is that slang is not necessarily to be frowned upon. The purpose of language is to communicate effectively. Granted, if you’re talking to the queen of England, she won’t understand “yo, dawg, whatsup”, but the reverse is also true. If you’re talking to a ghetto kid in high English he/she will be like ‘uh-uh’ with a face that beams attitude.

So language and its prescriptions are relative and, just as in any post-modern mindset, there is no right and wrong, but just a better/worse. So is it really that bad using ‘literally’? I feel as if arguing about it may be worse than actually just using it. Saying that, of course (after all this) I may be a bit of a hypocrite (logical consistency is very difficult to harvest after all).

Happy blogging

If you omit a word and the sentence retains its context, then the word is useless.

‘I laughed so hard I pissed myself’ and ‘I laughed so hard I literally pissed myself’ mean the same thing. Either way we aren’t hearing ‘literally’ and knowing it means ‘figuratively’ in this circumstance. We are seeing the lack of pissed pants or figuring it out from the tone of voice or our previous social experience with this phrase that it is meant figuratively.

The phrase itself and more importantly the word itself isn’t giving us any information we need and is dead weight when we used in this way. I get that it is ment to be funny, but it isn’t any funnier than omitting the word all together. Along with that, I don’t think anyone puts too much thought into it. They know what the words mean, they heard someone say it this way once upon a time, people laughed, so they repeated it hoping to get people to laugh.

Most of the people around me don’t use this and if they do they are trying to be funny (by making fun of people who use it to mean figuratively), but I wouldn’t get into debate about it if someone around me did have it slip out. People repeat what they hear. That’s how we learn language.

The idea that bothers me is making it be considered proper. People use slang and they misuse words for humor. That’s fine. Just don’t try to make it be considered proper just because the joke is so old it isn’t funny anymore. As someone mentioned earlier, just because many people can’t remember the difference between their, there, and they’re or to, too, and two doesn’t mean we should make it proper English that they are all interchangeable.

In the same way, just because a lot of people find it funny to use words to mean the opposite of themselves doesn’t mean we should make that part of their proper usage.

If we did this with just about anything else, I don’t think people would find it so cute or interesting or funny. Switch right and left around or stop and go and you’ll have plenty of pissed off people. It is only because literally is a throw-a-way word and it changes nothing in the sentence that some people have no problem with while others are only annoyed by it.

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Definition of literally, From the Oxford dictionary, However….

adverb
in a literal manner or sense; exactly:
the driver took it literally when asked to go straight over the roundabout
tiramisu, literally translated ‘pull-me-up’
informal used for emphasis while not being literally true:
I have received literally thousands of letters
In its standard use literally means ‘in a literal sense, as opposed to a non-literal or exaggerated sense’, as for example in
I told him I never wanted to see him again, but I didn’t expect him to take it literally
. In recent years an extended use of literally (and also literal) has become very common, where literally (or literal) is used deliberately in non-literal contexts, for added effect, as in
they bought the car and literally ran it into the ground
. This use can lead to unintentional humorous effects
(we were literally killing ourselves laughing) and is not acceptable in formal contexts, though it is widespread.
Hope you and others will enjoy the interpretation!

If, however, he said this alone in a dark room, he is most likely a lunatic.

“If you touch my dinner, I will literally tear you to pieces when I get back.”

Hyperbole.

“I literally murdered my friend yesterday because he touched my food.”

Not hyperbole. He either murdered his friend, or is a flaming idiot.