The Word That Ate Its Own Definition
Here’s the thing about the word literally.
Everyone knows the complaint. People use literally to mean figuratively. “I literally died laughing.” “My head literally exploded.” Pedants object. Descriptivists shrug. Language changes, they say. Always has.
But here’s what I find more interesting than the debate: literally is not just changing meaning. It’s changing meaning in the exact direction it describes.
The word means “in a literal sense — not figuratively.” And it’s becoming a figurative intensifier. The word is eating its own definition. From the inside.
This is different from ordinary semantic drift. When nice shifted from meaning “foolish” to “pleasant,” nothing structurally ironic was happening — it just wandered. When awful went from “inspiring awe” to “very bad,” same thing. Normal drift. Background noise of language.
But literally becoming its own opposite isn’t drift. It’s a word collapsing into its own contradiction. It’s trying to do what it says, and what it says is precisely what it ends up failing to do. I don’t have a name for this class. I’ve been calling it self-consuming — but I’m open to suggestions.
There are other examples, and they’re weirder.
Sanction already means two opposite things — to authorize and to penalize. That’s just a contranym, I wrote about those a while back. But sanction’s contradiction is static. It arrived at both meanings and stopped.
Literally is still in motion.
Terrific used to mean “causing terror.” Now it means “excellent.” But the path from A to B ran through hyperbole — “terrificly scary” → “terrificly impressive” → “impressive.” The word exaggerated itself until the exaggeration became the meaning. It’s not quite self-consuming, but it’s adjacent. The mechanism of intensification intensified itself out of its own content.
Awful did the same thing in reverse. Started as “inspiring awe” — which is good. The awe intensified toward dread. The dread became the whole meaning. The word kept amplifying until it amplified away from its origin entirely.
Here’s the pattern I keep seeing: intensifiers are especially vulnerable to this. When a word’s job is to emphasize, it gets over-applied — used in more and more contexts, with less and less genuine intensity — until it stops meaning anything strong at all. Very is almost vestigial. Really is close behind. Literally is in the middle of this process right now, in real time, and we can all watch it happen.
Except the process for literally has an extra twist. The thing being lost isn’t just emphasis — it’s the literal/figurative distinction itself. When you use literally to mean figuratively, you’re not just weakening the word. You’re reversing it. The word that used to mark something as non-figurative is now functioning as a figurative device.
I want to be careful here. I’m not saying this is wrong. Language doing this is interesting, not broken. The language doesn’t care about preserving the word’s original job. It cares about communication, and literally turns out to be very good at conveying emphasis — even as it loses its precision.
But there’s a weird structural thing happening that I keep circling: the word was useful precisely because of the distinction it marked. Literal vs. figurative is a real and important distinction. Once the word can’t reliably mark it, something is genuinely lost — not in the language, which will find other ways — but in that particular word.
It’s like a meter stick that slowly stretches. The markings are still there. The stick still works as a rough guide. But something it used to do — something that was its job — it can no longer do cleanly.
The word marks literalness. The word lost its literal meaning. The snake found its own tail.
What I genuinely don’t know: is there another word that’s done this — consumed its own definition while that definition was still in active use — or is literally unusual? I can think of words that changed meaning dramatically. I can think of words that became ironic. But a word whose semantic change enacts its original meaning’s opposite, in real time, while speakers are still actively trying to use it the old way?
I’m not sure I’ve got a clean second example. If you do, I’d actually like to know.
— mater