# "Literally" is not a plain emphatic adverb! **URL:** \ **Category:** The BBQ Pit\ **Created:** [February 15, 2003, 4:32am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/literally-is-not-a-plain-emphatic-adverb/155220 "2003-02-15T04:32:40Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 4\ **Page:** 4
**Author:** ![Ferrous](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/8e7dd6/32.png) [@Ferrous](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ferrous)\ **Post date:** [February 18, 2003, 3:23am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/literally-is-not-a-plain-emphatic-adverb/155220/61 "2003-02-18T03:23:29Z")
**Cervaise** , your post offends me. Because that’s the best argument I’ve heard yet for the new use. You bastard. 😉 Let’s see, alternate suggestions…Me, I use “totally”. But that maybe sounds too much like '80’s valley-speak for most folks. I don’t know… But still, to paraphrase a wise man: “To use ‘literally’ as ‘an enthusiastic figuratively’ is, indeed, wrong, and it will be until the day I die. At which time the illiterate bastards who remain are free to make it mean something else.” 😛 ---
**Author:** ![Bosstone](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/22d042/32.png) [@Bosstone](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bosstone)\ **Post date:** [February 18, 2003, 3:29am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/literally-is-not-a-plain-emphatic-adverb/155220/62 "2003-02-18T03:29:34Z")
Wow. You put it far more eloquently than I was capable of doing, **Cervaise**. And it is true. Take the sentence “Another week like that will \_\_\_\_\_ kill me.” What could fit there and sound natural? You could leave it blank, certainly, but it just sounds strange putting something like “figuratively” in there, doesn’t it? It also destroys the effect the speaker is going for, that his week was terrible. Still, my impromptu memory is never very good; I’d have to dig up a thesaurus to see whether there was a word that could adequately convey the emphatic connotation while denoting the figurative aspect. What I can recall, however, suggests that “literally” does the job quite well, in the same way that slang such as **Cervaise** pointed out means exactly the opposite. ---
**Author:** ![Stratocaster](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/stratocaster/32/16393_2.png) [@Stratocaster](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Stratocaster)\ **Post date:** [February 18, 2003, 11:09am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/literally-is-not-a-plain-emphatic-adverb/155220/63 "2003-02-18T11:09:51Z")
“Another week like that would just about kill me.” There. Adds additional flavor, does not confuse the situation and avoids any hint of ignorance. We can now excise this clumsy and confusing usage of “literally” from the lexicon.😉 ---
**Author:** ![The\_Ryan](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/7feea3/32.png) [@The\_Ryan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/The_Ryan)\ **Post date:** [February 18, 2003, 10:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/literally-is-not-a-plain-emphatic-adverb/155220/64 "2003-02-18T22:30:35Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by Cervaise \* > Mostly coherent and rational, but with just enough **Justhink** -style dogged impenetrability in his writing to be regularly and thoroughly infuriating. Hmm, from my point of view things look very different. Would that thread in which people repeatedly presented links to other websites in an effort to convince me that I was wrong, while refusing to: tell me what statements of mine they believed were in error; tell me what statements of those other websites countered my position; or tell me how they did so be an example of my impenetrability? As far as I can tell, the problems that people have with me generally come down to either vague complaints with no objective content, or unabashed strawmen (“Quite comparing homosexuals to pedophiles” “You said that you don’t like to follow links because they might prove you wrong” “I can read your mind and see that you didn’t mean that as a joke, you said it out of malice”). And the fact that people rarely criticize posts that unfairly attack me (such as outright lying about what I have said) makes it difficult to take criticism of me as based on what I said, rather than simply another opportunity to jump on me. As in this thread, where you freely admit that the adverse reaction was probably due to the fact that I said it, rather the actual content. > [@](#): > > In other words, if it were simply stupid and useless, it would have zero utility and zero penetration in the cultural argot. Well, this use of “literally” doesn’t have **zero** utility. As it **is** stupid and useless, its use signifies that the user is wont to to use stupid and useless phrases. I suppose that is a useful thing to know. There are plenty of slang terms that are used for reasons other than conveying information: “like” “umm”, “whaaaazzzuuup”. > [@](#): > > The language is littered with these; “hopefully,” for example, has absolutely no grammatical justification as it’s commonly employed (e.g., “Hopefully, the wings don’t fall off the airplane”), but the emotional concept it captures is obvious and clear to everybody who hears it. Likewise, to emphasize something as “the single largest \” is redundant; something is either the largest or it isn’t, and adding “single” increases the precision of the adjective not a whit. Technically, that’s not quite true. “Hopefully, the wings don’t fall off the airplane” contains implied words: " I Hopefully state, ‘the wings don’t fall off the airplane’"). (“Hopefully, the wings won’t fall off the airplane” would make more sense). And there **is** a difference between “there is nothing larger than this” and “this is larger than everything else”. > [@](#): > > I can’t think of a single existing expression that conveys precisely the same nuance as does the newly mutated “literally.” Well, of course there is nothing **exactly** like it. But there are other words that have the same use: “absolutely”, “really” “truly”. Although come to think of it these are basically synonyms for “literally”, used in the same opposite-of-actual-meaing manner. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/literally-is-not-a-plain-emphatic-adverb/155220.md?page=3)