Miscellaneous Movie Musings

[Alex]

Originally Posted by Cadaverous Pallor

I'm fighting the urge to bad mojo you for your use of the word "literally".

Tell it to Louisa May Alcott who wrote in Little Women "the land literally flowed with milk and honey."

Tell it to F. Scott Fitzgerald who wrote of Jay Gatsby that "he literally glowed."

Tell it to James Joyce who, in Ulysses, wrote of a Mozart piece that it is "the acme of first class music as such, literally knocking everything else into a cocked hat."

The use of the word literally in an unliteral way is at least a century older than the objection of modern proscriptive language mavens objecting to it.

Examples above drawn from this article from the editor of the Oxfored English Dictionary. As the article states, the English language is full of words used in opposition to their most...literal...meaning (and it also points out that the literal meaning of "literally" you are calling for is not actually the most literal original definition of the word).