| > You are tripping over the Recency Illusion. Maybe, or maybe it is an unprecedented recent spike. We're both guessing, I suspect. [5 minutes research later] Well, there is this measure of the frequency of 'literally' in books in English since 1600. (Although I meant in speech and online comments) https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=literally&year... Which does seem to possibly support the 'unprecedented spike' hypothesis! A huge surge since 1990, the largest ever, the word is now used twice as often as in books in 1990. Looking at examples from 1800-1820, during the 2rd biggest surge, which lasted around 100 years centred on 1840, https://www.google.com/search?q=%22literally%22&tbm=bks&tbs=... - none of those on the first few pages of results appear to be the general intensifier kind of 'literally'. Compare with 2019-2020, where most examples in the first few pages are the kind I've gotten so sick of lately: https://www.google.com/search?q=%22literally%22&tbm=bks&tbs=... I eagerly await further research in the field. :-) |
A modern confounder is that copy-editing activity has declined along with the cost of publication, so that misuse that previously appeared much less in print than in oral discourse now evades scrutiny. Transcripts of court testimony would give a better sense of how people spoke.
Nonetheless, from your link I find in 1812, "was literally bathed with sweat" and 1810, "it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel. This between the woman and the Serpent is most literally fulfilled ."