Every time I hear someone say ‘eh’ in a questioning tone or to mean ‘um actually’ I lose my shit. Or even just to play something down.
Like I literally come to hate the person instantly. Its a very strong feeling on a very small sound.
Instant downvotes if I see it on Lemmy too. HATE IT.
How about all y’all?
I literally dislike it whenever anyone uses the word literally when they clearly mean figuratively.
Its just extra syllables to lie to me.
There’s this process in language where intensifiers — words that amplify the strength of the meaning of the rest of the phrase — tend to become used in areas that they aren’t really truly appropriate in and thus “weaken” in meaning.
So, for example, “awesome” once truly meant “awe-inspiring”, but it’s been used enough in weaker senses the past several decades here in California that it doesn’t really mean that any more. It just means “very good” now.
I don’t think that the Brits do that with “awesome” — or at least not as much — but they like to use “colossally” in a similar way.
The above Wikipedia link has a list of intensifiers, including “literally”, and you can probably recognize a bunch of them that have “weakened”.
Epic
As I said in another comment, it isn’t just using it incorrectly that’s annoying, it’s also using it unnecessarily. People use “literally” for emphasis in sentences where no adverb is needed. It should only be used if you are clarifying that you mean literally when the sentence could otherwise be interpreted as figurative