A player on Big Brother said that both her parents ran track and so she was “literally born on the track”. Unless your mother went into labour on the track and gave birth right there, you were not literally born on the track!
A player on Big Brother said that both her parents ran track and so she was “literally born on the track”. Unless your mother went into labour on the track and gave birth right there, you were not literally born on the track!
That used to be the point of it. Over time the added impact that using it out of place gives to hyperbole has changed that point until it is necessary for enough context to exist to make clear that it is used in it’s original manner.
It’ll probably happen eventually to anything that replaces the world as well, sort of like how things like swear words and euphemisms lose their impact from overuse and end up getting replaced only to have the same happen again. At some level a quick way of saying “this is actually true” serves as an easy source of exaggeration if used somewhere where it clearly can’t be so, and as soon as someone does that, the meaning starts being dependant on context.
Which is only so bad because the purpose of the word itself is to provide context. It literally means “this is not a euphemism”, and the only reason to use it in the first place is if the existing context would lead one to assume it was.
When you need to give extra context and additional words to clarify an ambiguous “literally”, you’ve robbed the word of its original meaning. It can no longer fulfill that purpose. It would literally be more efficient to just not use it at all, and just skip straight to whatever you were going to say to clarify the context. The meaning has been stolen.