this post was submitted on 23 Jul 2025
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That's a great example of a word being misused. If the way a word is used makes its meaning less clear than before, it's being misused. Since "literally" can now mean "figuratively," you don't know how a person means it without additional information. If a new word came about to mean the opposite of "figuratively," all well and good, but without it, meaning is being objectively obfuscated. Another word that suffered this fate is "nonplussed," which means "being so surprised and confused a person doesn't know how to react," but is commonly used to mean "unperturbed," its opposite. Because of this, it's usually recommended to just not use it at all, because nobody can be sure what it's supposed to mean.
This can even happen to technical terms, for example bimonthly now has both the original meaning of once every 2 months, and also means semimonthly, twice a month.
In other words it's completely worthless as a word because it fails to specify between conflicting meanings.
"Biweekly" and "biannually" have the same problem. I guess the terms have stuck because the dates they're referring to are usually specified as well. It's not much help to only know that something will happen at some point within a week, month, or year. "Okay, but when, exactly?"