You say this like it’s a fact that the word “literally” is worse now than it was before its recent evolution. You’re reducing the entire value of a word to a metric of “clarity”/“muddledness”, but natural language has value beyond its ability to be technically precise.
It’s worse in that there is now no common way to say what it used to mean, without adding several more words, where previously one would have communicated the meaning clearly.
Anytime a language change increases the likelihood of misunderstanding it definitely has negative effects. It may also have positive effects, but it shouldn’t be simply accepted without regard to that.
Now, disagreement on whether a particular change’s negative outweighs its positive is going to happen, obviously, but it’s important to acknowledge the bad parts exist.
It’s also important not to accept a mistake and insist that it’s fine because language changes, out of pride and desire to not be mistaken - a trend I definitely see a lot. It’s often not ‘I am using this word in a different way and have considered it’s implications’, it’s ‘I don’t want to be wrong so I will insist that I didn’t make a mistake, language changes!’
A linguist looks at an example like “literally” and says, isn’t language amazing? Words change and evolve, are created and die off, and yet everything works, people don’t stop being able to express ideas because the language got screwed up, everything takes care of itself. People were making the same complaints about words being used the wrong way 200 years ago, and a thousand years ago, thinking now we’ve lost a critical piece of the language, but it’s always fine. We have languages like French with an academy that regulates it, and we also have languages that have never been written nor taught in school. And they are all capable of expressing whatever they need to express.
Why is requiring more words inherently worse? Are languages that require more words to express an idea worse than other languages which require less words? For example, English has lots of prepositions whose meaning is sometimes instead encoded by verb conjugation in languages like Spanish (e.g. infinitives requiring “to” in English but not in Spanish). Does that difference make English worse than Spanish?
It’s not necessarily worse, I suppose. I think it is worse in this example, perhaps you don’t, and I think we can acknowledge this as a reasonable difference of opinion.
I primarily object to the seemingly common attitude acting as though it is unreasonable to consider a change in language usage bad and be opposed to it at all. The attitude that anyone objecting to a language change has the same sort of ignorance as those who don’t want the language to ever change from whatever idealized version they have. These people are ridiculous, but not everyone who opposed any particular language change is one of them.
It’s not that the word “literally” is worse now. It’s that it used to represent an idea (the idea of a thing being non-figurative) which it’s slowly coming to not mean anymore.
Words map to meanings. Those mappings can shift and change over time. But if that happening leaves a particular meaning orphaned then I’d think of that as unfortunate, no?
Maybe instead of changes being “good” or “bad” it’s more like “this shift in language increases (or decreases) the total expressiveness of the language”. Would you be less up in arms at that way of putting it?
Here’s a fantastic example: sentient, sapient, and concious. These are VERY different words with wildly different meanings, but they’re practically treated as synonyms in colloquial usage. The only way to properly express them now is to use their entire definitions, and then people question why you’re being so specific or excluding certain things.
What if you just think of it as our culture putting less emphasis on the concept of “literally” and more on “figuratively”. And the evolution actually makes the language more expressive, given the things that we’re trying to express (on average).
I don’t agree that it decreased the total expressiveness of English, no. The modern colloquial use of “literally” is not identical to “figuratively”, or to “very”, or any other word I can think of - it’s an intensifier with a unique connotation that doesn’t have any good alternative. At worst, we have lost some expressiveness and gained some expressiveness, and there is no objective metric to decide whether that’s a “net positive” or a “net negative”; it’s just a change.
