[Warning: This post is to an extent self-indulgent because the conversation is going into areas in which I am sensitive and have a lot of personal history.]
On further reflection I'd certainly be willing to admit that that's true in speech--the sense gets across, after all, and while these things tend to annoy me I admit that the part of my post that Al is quoting was excessive hyperbole--but in writing I think it's at least somewhat more reasonable to value a certain degree of precision. Overusing 'very' in writing bothers me exactly as much as using 'literally' as an intensifier, and for this exact reason. (Mark Twain once advised writers who overused 'very' to replace each instance with 'damn'. The instances would be removed in the editing process, and the sentences would read exactly as they ought to.)
That's my, somewhat revised, position on this (which I think can be extended to prescriptivism in general; it's wrongheaded as applied to speech but has some merit in encouraging precise writing), but because the accusation of attempting to enforce a prestige sociolect is more accurate than I would generally like to admit I would like to mention how and why I came to have first instincts that are as superciliously prescriptivist as my original post was. As someone who had people attempt to drill my original dialect--which, like many things about my life, combined elements of urban Northeastern Italian-American and backwoods Swamp Yankee--out of me under the guise of 'speech therapy' in late childhood when I moved away from the area in which I originally lived, I have a
complicated personal relationship with these sorts of questions. A lot of my opinions about English grammar and usage are, I admit, hence matters of strongly personal aesthetic preference that have almost nothing to do with any legitimate branch of linguistics at all, and my aesthetic views on such issues are influenced by my younger self having compromised and defended my way into a somewhat elitist understanding of the nature of communication. In addition to differences between speech and writing I'm generally stridently descriptivist about pronunciation despite having a lot of prescriptivist pet peeves about usage, because usage was generally the level on which I conceded (or had spoken and written in a 'refined' way in the first place) whereas pronunciation was something whose distinctiveness I was less willing to let go. I've ended up code-switching a
lot.
It's also, on a level beyond any of the above, probably hypocritical of me to be concerned about this since I'm strongly in favor of using 'they' as a singular.
Anyone who opposes the use of literally as an intensifier is literally a prescriptivist monster.
The English language has more than enough intensifiers as it is. There are nowhere near as many words that mean what anything close to what 'literally' means.
...and that is why it works so well as an intensifier. I cringe a bit when I hear it used this way but it rarely fails to get my attention.
That's a really good point.
