How I wish advertisers would learn exactly what "literally" means. I have just read on Facebook that "Christmas is just around the corner as our top awarded **** Honey Nuggets literally flying off the shelves! "
Their honey nuggets sound delicious, and I'd believe them if they said that people were buying them as fast as they could bake them, or that they were metaphorically or almost or practically flying off the shelves, but they are NOT literally whizzing back and forth across the shop and dripping honey onto customers. How would they get into baskets if the customers had to get a butterfly net to catch them?
If you say something is happening literally, then it is absolute fact - if you stood there and watched, you would see them leap up and come towards you, and have to dodge them. If they mean that they are selling so fast that they can compare it to flying off the shelves, then they are flying "metaphorically" - that is, they have used the phrase as an imaginary ilustration of the speed at which they are leaving the shelves.
Not just advertisers. Literally is now used by a lot of people as just another was of putting emphasis on what they are saying. I daresay therer will now be a flurry of posts telling me that language changes. So it does, but blunting the meaning of a word weakens the effect it has and impoverishes the language.
