Grammar Girl here. I'm In Yon Fogarty, your friendly guide to the English language. We talk about writing, history, roles, and other cool stuff. Today, we're going to talk about why people use the word literally, when they don't mean literally, literally, literally. And then we're going to have a fun segment about where we get the ham in the name Ham Radio.

I don't think it's a stretch to say the rise of people using the word literally in a non-literal way

is one of the most hotly contested new word usages this century.

Many find this figurative use, as in I literally

died when he said that, to be annoying at best and grammatically destructive at worst. So how does a

word like literally essentially end up, meaning it's opposite? Well, the surprising answer is that literally had become much more figurative

long before we got to using it the way we do today. To see how, let's look at how it's changed over time.

Take a minute to think back to high school and the many assignments in English class asking you to contrast the literal or

direct meaning of a text with the more figurative meaning arising from things like metaphors and

similes. The way literal is used in academic assignments like these isn't that far off from the way

literal was mostly used when it first

entered English in the late 14th century. In these earliest times, people used the word literally

to point to a specific type of textual reading, describing a plain or straightforward interpretation

of the words compared to a moral, metaphorical, or allegorical reading of the same words.

For example, in this line from a piece by the philosopher, poet, and theologian, Henry Moore.

All those passages are not to be literally understood.

That's almost exclusively how it was used at the time.

Already, though, this use in English was somewhat removed from the meaning of its etymological ancestor, the classical Latin word liter.

At the beginning of the common era, litera specifically referred to the letters of the

alphabet or to the things involving such letters. This is how this route also spawned the English

words literature and literate. These words came from early meanings that Latere developed in Latin,

the idea of something containing letters,

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