She literally couldn't hear me

The newspaper column that I write always ends with an e-mail address where readers can contact me. And they do, often to cheer on my fight against bad grammar and to ask me to tell people to stop engaging in some linguistic habit that drives them nuts.

That would be lovely if 1. I had ever given the tiniest indication that I was in fact “fighting” against bad grammar, and 2. I had any desire to tell people how to use the language.

I don’t do either in my column. Never have. I just talk about questions that come up and the answers I find.

Usually those answers are not what grammar-cop types want to hear — research almost always proves them wrong in matters like whether you can use “hopefully” to mean “I hope that” or “healthy” to mean “healthful” (answer to both: of course you can).

Lucky for them, the things I actually say needn’t stand in the way of their hearing whatever they want to hear.

For example, a while back I wrote a column about the word “literally.” In it, I explained that some dictionaries allow the word to be used as an intensifier — that is, figuratively. According to those sources, it’s fine to say, “I literally flew out of the room.” And I said so in the column.

What happened next shouldn’t have surprised me, but it did. Not one but two readers wrote to congratulate me on my column railing against people's excessive and wrong use of “literally.”

“Thank you SO much for addressing the overuse of “literally”! That’s been bugging me for some time now. At work, I’m surrounded by young women who use that word constantly."

She wasn't done.

She asked me to consider writing a column telling people it’s wrong to say, “filing bankruptcy” instead of “filing for bankruptcy” and “graduating college” instead of “graduating from college.” You won’t be surprised to hear there’s nothing wrong with those expressions.

I wrote back that neither of her peeves was an actual error, but I suspect that when she got the email she interpreted it to mean the opposite.

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This entry was posted on Monday, September 8th, 2025 at 11:59 am and is filed under Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.