Unfortunately, this very particular pair of meanings is always going to be sabotaged by hyperbole. Not the words, but the actual meanings.

Whatever word we have for "this is [truthfully] [adjective]", they're always going to use the word for "truthful" to give something added punch. Specifically in the sense of suggesting a quality has become so extreme that the metaphor is no longer an exaggeration.

Part of it is we humans just love metaphors come to life. Godzilla "literally" was taller than a skyscraper. Superman "literally" was stronger than a freight train. Tolkien was disappointed enough as a kid in Dunsinane forest "coming to life and walking" (by a bunch of men chopping off branches for camouflage, in MacBeth), that he wanted to do a story where the trees literally walked, without any metaphorical fine print.

Frankly, too bad. There is no meaningful resistance to this change in language. You can't use the word "awesome" to mean "deeply terrifying" in almost any context anymore and that is okay.

That is okay because you can use the phrase “deeply terrifying”. Languages change in general. I’m fine with that.

This specific change literally has had me pacing back and forth in distress before.

Then use the word nonfiguratively instead of literally.

But you can't use the phrase "quite literally"? or "in a very literal sense of the word", or some variation of those?

If this is what has you pacing in distress, I'm envious.

> I’m envious

Well I’m also getting divorced, for reasons that aren’t entirely unrelated to literal communication.

That's more paceworthy I'd say, at least compared to the natural evolution of language continuing as it has for all of recorded history.

I’m not objecting to the natural evolution of language in general. I’m objecting to the specific loss of the word “literally”.

So you're objecting to the natural evolution of language.

Couldn't you say "in the literal sense"? Until the word treadmill claims that too of course.

Meanwhile, natural language isn't formal language, and people understand meanings of statements just as much as they did yesterday.

If people raise objections, that suggests that they are having issues with understanding. I know I've been confused by it before, and I usually feel compelled to use modifiers to distinguish between 'literally millions' and 'actually, no-exaggeration, literally millions' when I want to be understood.

That doesn't necessarily mean we're moving in the wrong direction. Language evolves to satisfy speakers' criteria, so it will gradually improve median utility. But any change is going to have cost, and confusion could be the price we pay for progress.

Alternately, you can imagine a situation where 1% of the population derives a huge amount of utility from a word, while 99% only get a small benefit from another definition. Improvements to the median in that scenario can have negative consequences in aggregate. Or you can see that this particular usage has been confusing people for a hundred years, and the cost of change may outweigh any potential benefit.

I think the position that natural language will just take care of itself is just a touch hand-wavey. Human interests and linguistic-evolutionary movement are often coaligned, but sometimes diverge- the same as with human interests and economic growth.

> I think the position that natural language will just take care of itself is just a touch hand-wavey.

Why not? It's done just that for countless millenia. Cavemen without Ph.D.'s in linguistics managed to develop languages for communication just fine.

Now, they could be further optimized, sure. But the default of taking no conscious action at all has historically worked out just fine for linguistic evolution.

In the last half of the last millenium, we achieved widespread literacy, invented the printing press, made publishing available to the public, and invented the internet. I don't think we can assume the process that worked before this tech will definitely work now.

On reflection, I'd like to retract this. I was reading quickly and didn't understand what I was replying to.

It is not my belief that, left to its own devices, natural language will become unusable. It is probably true that we can get away with letting nature run its course. I do object to using this as an argument for avoiding optimization, but I don't think I'm in disagreement with the parent there. Apologies for my error.

> and people understand meanings of statements just as much as they did yesterday.

This is the underlying source of my distress: the fear that my ability to understand and be understood by people will remain as it is.