Literally

Oh, what trendy lives we lead, and that applies equally to the words we choose. Probably the lamest, most annoying habit in spoken communication today is the rampant use of "literally" to embellish what we say. It's out of control. It has no logic. And by now, it should be starting to drive a few of us bonkers.

That people say literally so often is quite a mystery. Twenty years ago we rarely heard it. Today some folks blithely roll it off their tongues to intensify everything. "They had literally no help from bystanders." "I was so mad, I literally exploded." "She literally bawled her head off." Oh, spare me. That's not what literally means.

In fact literally means just what it appears to mean: in a literal sense. Somewhere in the evolution of English it took on the role of describing something both literal and figurative, for example: "Our wood stove was so inefficient that all our money literally went up in smoke." That would make sense. It would also make sense if I had a one-legged friend literally named Peg who was lazing about the house and I told her to hop to it — literally. But I digress. What I'm trying to say is that when it's used correctly, literally will not occur very often in day-to-day conversations.

Recently I overheard "I literally peed myself laughing." Now, what the heck did that mean? That woman was announcing that she actually urinated in her clothes. In public. The routine and reckless use of literally by so many people has robbed the word of its usefulness since we no longer know what to believe when we hear it. 'You literally urinated?' you think to yourself. 'I gather, then, that you literally died of embarrassment when it was all over?'

I won't spend more time belabouring how literally is so often squandered. That's been done by thousands of others. Look anywhere — online or in textbooks, for example — and you'll find authorities expressing frustration about how this word is misused and abused. What irks me today is that in spite of the presence of clear, informative facts, there is such a surprising number of people who still don't get it. What's more, I can't fathom that so many of us would utter an unwieldy four-syllable word all day long without even caring to know what it means. That in itself raises a discussion that strays from my point here: that we should say what we mean and we should mean what we say.

In a crazy world already fraught with miscommunication, we don't need more bewildering language in the air. For everything spoken around the globe, what we really need is simplicity. We need clarity. The more people choose trendy words without reason, the more they contribute to the overall vagueness of the language we use as a tool for communicating our thoughts, our sentiments, and our ideas with other members of our species.