I used to be a grammar nazi, until I discovered “literally.”

We all have that friend: the one who corrects everything you say. “You mean whom not who,” they say, or, “It’s ‘you and I’ not ‘you and me.’” I think we all kind of hate that person a little bit, even if they are our best friend (he would say just then, ‘even if he or she is our best friend’). This type of person gets called a grammar nazi. They ruthlessly nitpick at your grammar and style based on the thousands of rules we learned in elementary and high school.

I used to be that person. I pointed out everything wrong with the way my friends talked. I cringed when I heard someone from an “inferior” dialect like Appalachian or Southern. If we’re being PC about it, I was a “language purist.” In reality, there was nothing pure about what I did. I was mean and rude, and I didn’t even know it. I thought I was helping people get their point across better. Then I discovered the overused word literally. I hated it at first, too. “That was literally the worst movie ever,” a friend said. “Oh really?” I asked. “Have you seen every movie ever made? Are you an expert on movies?” The friend responds, “That’s not what I meant,” and as the horrible person I was, I said, “Then you shouldn’t have used literally.” Eyes rolled. Faces cringed. People changed subjects to get me to shut up. Yep, and I bet you know someone exactly like this. You might even do this yourself.

The Two Uses of Literally

There are actually two ways literally can be used, according to every dictionary I’ve looked through. The first way is the way grammar nazis allow. It means “in a literal sense” or “exactly as stated.” The other way, the way my friend used it, gives the following phrase a heightened effect or suggests that the interpretation should be as close to exactly as stated as possible. Examples are the best way to show this.

1. Imagine I just saw a man snatch a purse at gunpoint. The police show up and ask me some questions. One officer asks, “Did you see anything?” I respond, “I literally saw him point a gun in her face.”
2. Imagine I’m browsing Wikipedia and come across an interesting fact about blue-footed boobies. I get excited and call up a friend, and say, “You won’t believe this about blue-footed boobies. This fact literally blew my mind.”

For me, and hopefully for you, there’s no confusion between the two uses of literally. 1 clearly uses it in the first sense I described, and 2 in the second. Grammar nazis would never allow the second one to get through, but they are looking over something important for the second meaning. In the second sense, literally precedes a metaphor or idiom. This is extremely important to know: it means the second sense can’t be used outside of this scenario. I would never say, “I literally saw him point a gun in her face,” unless I actually saw that happen. On the other hand, “blew my mind” is a popular internet-perpetuated idiom. We all know my mind didn’t get blown, but adding literally heightens that idiom beyond its normal meaning: it got as close to blowing my mind as physically possible.

This Isn’t a New Phenomenon

The grammar nazis and language purists don’t care that there is still a rule and structure to this sense, but now we get to the part where I began to change my mind about it and every other silly purist peeve. They all claim, and so did I, that the internet did this. Lazy teenagers did this, because they lack the stylistic prowess to come up with a real way to get their point across. They hijacked literally and we’re worse off for it.

What if I told you the second sense of literally is older than the United States of America?

It is. The first recorded use of literally in the second sense is 1769, a full seven years before Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence. Frances Brooke wrote the sentence, “He is a fortunate man to be introduced to such a party of fine women at his arrival; it is literally to feed among the lilies.” Everything after literally is a metaphor, and I think that’s obvious, but I don’t get the sense that this man was introduced to female lilies instead of female humans.

I broke down when I saw this in the Oxford English Dictionary. I had been looking it up to prove to someone that literally can’t be used this way, that dictionaries wouldn’t allow such definitions to be in there, but it was, and not only that it was older than me and my parents and my grandparents and my great-grandparents and a couple more generations. What do I do now?

1769 isn’t old enough, I told myself. No way is that enough time for a word to completely change meanings or add a new meaning. Clearly the dictionary had that in there for clarification, as a way to show what you might hear but you should never use. I had to prove it, and I thought of the perfect word to prove it wasn’t old enough.

Gay.

It means homosexual. It can be used as a noun to mean someone who is gay, and usually refers to males, but can also refer to lesbians. In the olden days, it was a synonym for “happy,” but just how long ago was that? When did it change? The 1920s. That’s when gay first appears as meaning homosexual. If I can accept gay’s change that happened less than a hundred years ago, then I guess I have to accept literally’s change that happened over two hundred years ago. It would be hypocritical to say that gay’s new definition is allowed, but literally’s is too young to be correct.

Languages Evolve

I had lost my ability to argue literally, and with it I lost my need to argue grammar. The fact is that languages are not set; they are constantly changing and evolving as new ideas pop up. We get new technology, new ways to describe people, and sometimes we make up new words for these situations like e-mail, but sometimes we hijack old words. Sometimes we let old words have figurative meanings so can we strengthen idioms and clichés that usually have no meaning at all.

We have to accept it. This is what dictionaries do when they add yolo and swag and throw in a second definition of literally. Your dictionary is not losing its sophistication and neither is your language. Instead, the dictionary is desperately trying to create a complete record of how we use the words we say. Some might say that the dictionary tells us how to properly use a word, but I’m here to say that the dictionary exists to keep track of how we are properly using words. It is a database so that a hundred years from now when someone sees an old Time article about swag, they can figure out what the hell that means.

It goes beyond dictionaries, too. People are discriminated against and huge prejudices exist because we have this idea of how language should be used. Too often is an African-American denied a job or an Appalachian’s ideas dismissed because the way they talk and the words they use are inferior to the more proper dialects of the Midwest and New England. A study conducted by the University of North Texas found that employers judge and discriminate when hiring new employees based on their accent and dialect. Non-standard dialect speakers (Appalachia and Southern primarily) are often overlooked in job selection, because the way they talk is considered less intelligent. It carries with it the stereotype that these people are less educated and of a lower socio-economic class. When anti-discrimination laws are in place, people go to something that isn’t protected: the way you talk. There have even been cases of federal agencies firing workers because their accent was too strong to understand, yet these people spoke fluent English.

You might think that your purism doesn’t affect these people, but it does. By being a grammar nazi, by declaring that your version of English is more correct than somebody else’s, you’re saying that they are inferior to you. Accents go beyond how a letter is pronounced. They also have different slang terms and different syntactic structures. Purism perpetuates stereotypes, racism, and classism. So learn from literally, like I did. This isn’t to say that formal writing shouldn’t be corrected. This isn’t to say you can’t tell someone you don’t know what they mean. Mistakes still happen—ones that require clarification. We get confused sometimes. We might not know a dialect perfectly and get caught up in a specific way they say something. It happens, and it’s OK. Know the difference, however, between asking for clarification about what someone says and telling them their English is worse than yours.