literally

[Benjamin Zimmer]

On Tue, Mar 23, 2010 at 4:04 PM, Victor Steinbok <aardvark66 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I wanted to come back to this one more time--I am sure it's been
> mentioned before (and if not here, surely elsewhere--
> http://bit.ly/dti9fg ). I hate doing it from on-air comments that I
> overheard and cannot reproduce as evidence, but so it goes.
>
> There is a general tendency--I want to say "recently" but want to avoid
> a potential recency bias--to use the word "literally" as an emphasis on
> top of the already figurative use.

A good place to start is Jesse Sheidlower's 2005 piece for Slate:

http://www.slate.com/id/2129105/

I followed up on Language Log:

http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/002611.html

...and also wrote on the topic more recently for Word Routes:

http://www.visualthesaurus.com/cm/wordroutes/1499/


--Ben Zimmer

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org