Bryan Garner, author of “Garner’s Modern American Usage,’’ has developed a scale for the five stages of misuse. Stage one is when usage mistakes crop up, but are widely rejected. By the time a word reaches the dreaded stage five, Garner writes that the incorrect definition is “truly universal, and the only people who reject it are eccentrics.’’(Videos: short, long. HT: Linda Holmes.)
Garner now puts “literally’’ at stage three, which is defined as “being used by a majority of the language community.’’ However, Ben Zimmer, executive producer of the Visual Thesaurus and Vocabulary.com, believes “literally’’ has already slipped dangerously close to stage four, which means that it has become ubiquitous and only a few diehards reject the new meaning.
Tuesday, July 19, 2011
A CHRIS TRAEGER GRAMMAR RODEO SPECIAL: Yes, literally weeks after we tackled the topic, the Boston Globe explores what literally must be America's most overused adverb:
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