It's a good question, though I suppose it was mostly rhetorical (:
For me, I feel there is some fuzzy line to draw between "some use" and "over-use". For "literally," it seemed to get really bad maybe 10-15 years ago, where literally everyone was literally dying over literally the smallest things, and it has tapered off a bit since then (just my personal experience).
I feel like my eyes start to roll when it is paired with a lack of self-awareness. Using it as though it were for emphasis, but not actually being emphatic — just tacking it on pointlessly.
Now I'm getting flashbacks to the complaints about inserting "like" everywhere, which somehow has managed to, like, find its niche and persist irregardlessly.
Richard Dawkins I think made a very good point on Twitter once: If word usage is new and novel and increases expressiveness, we should keep it. If not, we should try and oppose it. Because we want richer ways of expressing ourselves.
This in response to people using "like" too much. As in "Jane was like ... And then I was like ...". "like" doesn't mean "I said" here. So he was supporting the new usage even though he hated it.
Merging "literally" and "figuratively" reduces our expressiveness. Without context ques and maybe not even then if something outlandish actually happens, you can't be sure what was meant. What's the benefit of ambiguity?
Similarly "open source" has a precise meaning especially if you are a programmer. Lots of disciplines have precise meanings for words that might mean something else to the lay person. We don't change maths and physics to suit the layman. Why should we change the meaning of open source? If you don't like the concept as defined, you can invent your own term! Some people have and we have things like "Copy Left".
You could argue that there is some natural evolution of language, but we are also the only species on earth that has literally (not figuratively) changed the planet. So why not mold our languages too? Why should these people who are sticklers for language give in?
For me, I feel there is some fuzzy line to draw between "some use" and "over-use". For "literally," it seemed to get really bad maybe 10-15 years ago, where literally everyone was literally dying over literally the smallest things, and it has tapered off a bit since then (just my personal experience).
I feel like my eyes start to roll when it is paired with a lack of self-awareness. Using it as though it were for emphasis, but not actually being emphatic — just tacking it on pointlessly.
Now I'm getting flashbacks to the complaints about inserting "like" everywhere, which somehow has managed to, like, find its niche and persist irregardlessly.