Recently, Los Angeles Times columnist Meghan Daum wrote about the word “literally.” It’s not OK, she argued, that the Oxford English Dictionary expanded the definition of “literally” to include “informal, used for emphasis while not being literally true.”
“If we cave on ‘literally,’” Daum wrote, “it will only be a matter of time before we'll be granting equal rights to ‘irregardless.’”
I like Meghan Daum. She’s a brilliant writer with a gift for finding fascinating new perspectives on every topic she touches. But on this matter, she’s just wrong.
To illustrate why, let me spin a tale.
Once upon a time, a hairy club-wielding person we’ll call Grug saw a hole in the side of a mountain. He went inside and noticed that water was no longer falling on his head. He hurried to tell some other hairy people about it. “Come see the, the ...” Grug didn’t have a word for his discovery, so he finished his sentence with “crob,” which derived from a term that, roughly translated, meant “Now kids, I don’t want you painting on the walls in here.”
