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How is it misuse? This is how words are used - people use turns of phrase and metaphors, and then popular metaphors become secondary meanings. Very popular secondary meanings can even become grammar pieces - like "very", which has become the most standard intensifier, but used to be a normal adverb, like literally and truly.




It’s an inadvertent step toward Newspeak, where we no longer have a word that means what “literally” used to unambiguously mean.



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