About 5 years ago, several dictionaries altered their entries for literally to include a definition that says it’s used to describe things that aren’t actually literal.
I noticed at the time that in some of the responses to the announcements people were quite irate that dictionaries had redefined literally in a way that doesn’t mean what “it’s supposed to mean”.
Maybe you were one of the people upset by the announcements. Perhaps you’re one of the people who still criticizes others’ figurative uses of literally.
There’s something you should probably know about literally.
So, the word comes from the Medieval Latin word litteralis, which meant “of a letter” and itself derived from the Latin littera , which meant “letter”. It was used to refer to something in an exact way, letter by letter as it were.
The first record we have of this usage is from a 1429 work called The Mirour of Man Saluacion.
Litteraly haf ȝe herde this dreme and what it ment.
The Mirour of Mans Saluacion, 1429
But over the next couple of centuries, the word started to gain an added meaning, one that was used to intensify a sentence. It was still used in a literal sense, however. For example:
my daily bread is literally implored
John Dryden, 1687, The Hind and the Panther
By the time Frances Brooke published her novel The History of Emily Montague in 1769, however, that intensifier role had migrated to the figurative as well.
He is a fortunate man to be introduced to such a party of fine women at his arrival; it is literally to feed among the lilies.
Frances Brooke, 1769, The History of Emily Montague
Using literally in a figurative sense isn’t something reserved for the uncouth and uneducated. Many authors since Brooke have also used it in a figurative sense, some of them quite well known, including the following:
- James Joyce
- Charlotte Brontë
- Louisa May Alcott
- William Makepeace Thackeray
- Mark Twain
- Willa Cather
- Vladimir Nabokov
- F. Scott Fitzgerald
- Charles Dickens
- John Dryden
- Jane Austen
- Alexander Pope
The usage that prescriptivists deride is over 250 years old. No one who is complaining about the inclusion of the figurative usage of literally in the dictionary was around when Brooke used it in that way. Heck, their great great grandparents weren’t even alive then.
And maybe that’s the main reason why it’s viewed with disdain. Because of the relative recency of our own lives, we view such things as the figurative literally or the singular they as recent inventions, despite their being several centuries old.
