If You're a Living Language Type, Then You Have No Right to Dictate to Traditionalists How They Use Language
This bit of cringey meme usage is bad enough, but it’s used to express an even more aggravating sentiment: the ubiquitous suggestion, on the internet, that preferring a traditionalist reading of a word is wrong while a “living language” approach is correct. But if language is living, you must hold that the old way is equally valid as the new. Sure, literally has been used to mean figuratively for 250 years - but it’s been used to mean literally that entire time as well, or longer. So if you privilege the newer use above the older, you are a certain kind of prescriptivist yourself. If you’re the one who’s forever beating the drum that literally can mean figuratively, and you never are out there fighting for the right to use it the old way, you’re not fighting prescriptivism, you’re just engaged in a squabble about what’s prescribed.
Take note that the point is not that this tweet is saying that using literally literally is wrong. The point is that by insisting that the more expansive definition is valid, it necessarily shuts down the reading that only the more traditional definition is valid. And this is the point: insisting that there is more than one reading of a given term is not any more malleable or postmodern than insisting that there is only one. In each case, there are simply dueling prescriptivisms, ideas of usage in combat. There is no right or wrong definition but the will to power.
Now, tell me - when has Merriam-Webster ever tweeted about how traditionalist usages of language are just as valuable as newer usages? I’ll save you the time: they haven’t. They haven’t, because just like everyone else who heavy-handedly insists that emerging usages are just as valid, they’re implicitly arguing that emerging usages are the only valid use. And the reason for that is just bullshit contrived populism. We live on Planet Populist, and yet the populists are always angry - people wear athleisure to the office, enjoying relaxed rules of dress decorum, but shit talk the person who still wears a suit; Marvel dominates the box office, but its fans never stop complaining about a lack of respect; every movie and show gets made for the fandom community, but they consider themselves terribly oppressed; and nobody polices language more lustily than people who complain about the language police. Merriam-Webster is merely voicing the rage of the enfranchised.
If you think that language simply is the way that people use it, then sure, condone people using “literally” to mean its (literal) traditional opposite - but don’t tell me I’m wrong to use it the traditional way. The advantage of the traditional way, after all, is that when we embrace it, there is a word that means what literally once meant - as in, actually, in actual fact, in exact terms. When literally becomes just an intensifier, it joins hundreds of other terms that occupy that position, and something is lost. And you can’t tell me that the expansive definition is better because you’ve already foresworn the notion of a better or worse definition. If you do, your argument literally undermines itself.
Update: To be more clear - the traditionalist definition is exclusive of the postmodern definition. Therefore to call for a synthesis of the two is to necessarily privilege the latter! You can't wiggle out if this by saying “well let's just accept both!” The traditionalist reading is defined by the very refusal to do so.
The point of this post is that the self-flattering definition of some as groovy postmoderns who permit all definitions simply hides a latent prescriptivism. Consider the scenario.
Traditionalist: literally should only be used in its traditional sense.
Groovy postmoderns: people should use literally however they want, man!
Some of you are proposing that Merriam -Webster is allowing for a synthesis of these two positions by saying "some people can use one definition, others another." But this is to deny the very substance of the traditionalist position, which is against such mutability in usage! Therefore the compromise is not a compromise at all but a backdoor endorsement of the second definition. It's not some enlightened both-siderism but a game rigged for the living language perspective. Which again underlines my humble point: all there is is the will to establish a preferred definition. Debates about language change are a matter of social power, not linguistic philosophy.
This is going to start a figurative fight.
I don't disagree, but this seems like a strange argument--because if you insist on selecting words based on their definitions from decades and centuries ago, who's going to understand you? I mean, I don't see anybody telling you you're "wrong" for using a word "traditionally" (whatever that means.)