Baldo by Hector D. Cantú and Carlos Castellanos for December 09, 2021

Don’t you just literally loathe it when people use the adverb in question figuratively?

There are literally way too many people numb to the suffering all around us.

I think she means overusing it.

She is figuratively using it to death.

If she’s talking about the results of plastic pollution, it should be “litterally”.

And literarilly?

Substitute “actually” for “literally” in this strip and note how the meaning changes . . . or doesn’t.

But woolly mammoths, sabre-toothed tigers, etc. did not actively contribute to their own extinction.

SCARE the young! Get them in line YOUNG! Old people are HARD to fool!

One of the few.

Funny Greta Thunberg imitation…Lol

She’s literally using literally incorrectly for half of her rant. The ice caps aren’t melting.

We are literally in for a lot of misery! Sorry child . Your elders should know better.

Humanity is literally causing it’s own extinction event. That’s a really literal catastrophe…for humans, but that might be life-saving for all the other species.

We are literally doing nothing substantive to change our course

She’s implying that other usages of the word are ‘incorrect.’ They’re not, at least not all of them are. Hers is simply the original sense. The most common alternate senses, “figuratively,” and as a null intensifier, are common enough that most dictionaries of American English have entered those meanings of the word for at least ten years. Those are among the things the word means nowadays, though that wasn’t always the case.

Do I wish fewer Americans didn’t know the difference? Sure. But language change is rarely driven by the more educated members of society. Some educated people in the 16th and 17th centuries complained about words that Shakespeare (apparently) made up that we use all the time today.