Christopher Muther, “Literally the Most Misused Word” (Boston Globe, July 19, 2011)
Garner now puts “literally’’ at stage three, which is defined as “being used by a majority of the language community.’’ However, Ben Zimmer, executive producer of the Visual Thesaurus and Vocabulary.com, believes “literally’’ has already slipped dangerously close to stage four, which means that it has become ubiquitous and only a few diehards reject the new meaning.
Zimmer has a simple solution: Rephrase your sentence.
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