Lexicographer Breaks Down in Tears After Learning How People Actually Use the Word 'Literally'

Associate editor Dr. Philip Headword of the Cambridge Advanced Dictionary suffered what colleagues described as 'a professional crisis of faith' on Wednesday after reviewing a corpus of 14,000 contemporary citations for the word 'literally,' the overwhelming majority of which used the word to mean its exact opposite. 'I knew it was bad,' Dr. Headword said, removing his glasses and pressing his palms against his eyes. 'I did not know it was this bad. "I literally died." "My head literally exploded." "I was literally on fire." These people are not dead. Their heads are intact. They were not on fire. And yet the corpus doesn't lie.' The citations, collected from social media, published journalism, and broadcast transcripts over a three-year period, showed that 87 percent of contemporary usage of 'literally' was non-literal. Only 13 percent used the word in its traditional sense of 'in a literal manner.' 'The word has become its own antonym,' Dr. Headword said. 'It is an autoantonym. It means both "actually" and "not actually." It means everything. It means nothing. I went into lexicography to document meaning, and this word has looked me in the eye and said: there is no meaning.' Dr. Headword's recommendation to the editorial board was to add a second sense to the dictionary entry acknowledging the intensive, non-literal usage — a decision he described as 'correct, necessary, and personally devastating.' 'Descriptive lexicography means recording the language as it is, not as I wish it were,' he said. 'But I want the record to show that I am not happy about this. I am literally unhappy. And I am using "literally" in its original sense, because some of us still do that.' Dr. Headword has requested a week of personal leave to 'process the implications.' His out-of-office message reads: 'I am literally unavailable. You'll have to guess which sense I mean.'