It failed completely, and that is the happy ending. The "mistakes" became Italian. Oclus turned into occhio (eye). Calda turned into caldo (hot). Veclus turned into vecchio (old). The sloppy Latin of ordinary Romans grew into Italian, Spanish, French, Portuguese and Romanian, the native languages of more than 900 million people today.
Every language you admire today is somebody's ancestors' bad grammar, a few centuries on.
The complaint is always the same
People have been sure their language was collapsing for as long as we have records. In 1712, Jonathan Swift wrote a whole pamphlet, A Proposal for Correcting, Improving and Ascertaining the English Tongue, worrying that "the Corruptions in our Language" had "at least equalled the Refinements of it." He hoped a way might be found "to fix it for ever."
English did not get fixed. Since then it has picked up the scientific vocabulary of the Industrial Revolution, the slang of every generation, and the words of a global language. By any practical measure it is more useful now than in Swift's day.
The pattern repeats. Each generation hears the young speak differently and assumes the change is a loss. Linguists, who study change across centuries, almost universally disagree. Change is how a living language works. The only languages that stop changing are the ones nobody speaks any more.
Case study: "literally"
Few word crimes cause more anger than "I literally died laughing." The word is supposed to mean "actually, not figuratively," and here it means the opposite. Surely this is new and lazy?
It isn't new. The Oxford English Dictionary's earliest example of the loose, emphatic use comes from Frances Brooke's 1769 novel The History of Emily Montague, and writers including Mark Twain and James Joyce used it the same way. Major dictionaries record it, usually with a note that some people object.
It isn't even unusual. Look at what happened to the word very. It comes from Old French verai, meaning true, the same root as verify and veracity. When Chaucer called his Knight "a verray, parfit gentil knyght" around 1400, he meant a true, perfect, noble knight. Over time, "truly" became a general booster, and nobody now thinks "very good" is a misuse. Really and truly have gone the same way. Words that mean "this is actually true" keep turning into words that just mean "a lot." Literally is simply the latest one in the line.
Which doesn't mean you have to like it. In careful writing, the emphatic literally can confuse a reader or make you sound casual. That is a style choice about your audience, not a rule of the language.
How meanings drift
Words move in a handful of predictable directions:
| Word | It used to mean | Kind of change |
|---|---|---|
| nice | foolish, ignorant (Latin nescius, "not knowing") | went up in the world |
| silly | lucky, blessed (Old English sǣlig) | went down, via "innocent" and "naive" |
| awful | awe-inspiring, full of awe | went down |
| terrific | terrifying | went up |
| girl | a young child, boy or girl | narrowed |
| meat | any solid food | narrowed |
| deer | any animal (compare German Tier) | narrowed |
| bead | a prayer | shifted, via the beads used to count prayers |
| cool | cold | widened, through African American slang, to "fashionable" |
None of these was planned. Each one happened because millions of speakers, each just trying to be understood, nudged a word a little further in one direction.
Sounds change too
Spelling holds a fossil record of sounds that have moved on. Between about 1400 and 1700, English went through the Great Vowel Shift, which moved all of its long vowels. In Chaucer's time, bite sounded close to modern "beet," and out sounded like "oot." The spelling stayed put while the sounds moved, which is a big reason English spelling is so strange today (see Phonetics & the IPA in this category).
Grammar shifts as well. Singular "they" ("someone left their umbrella") feels modern to some people, but it goes back to the 1300s, only about a century after English borrowed "they" from Old Norse. It was named the American Dialect Society's Word of the Year for 2015, and Merriam-Webster's for 2019, not because it was new, but because of its growing use for people who identify as neither he nor she.
Why change happens
Linguists point to a few engines:
- Ease. Speakers smooth out awkward sounds. Oculus became oclus because it was quicker to say.
- Expressiveness. Intensifiers wear out from overuse, so people reach for fresh ones: very, then really, then literally, then whatever comes next.
- Identity. People talk like the groups they belong to or want to belong to. In a famous 1963 study, "The social motivation of a sound change," William Labov traced a shifting vowel on Martha's Vineyard, the Massachusetts island, to social tensions among the people who lived there.
- Contact. Languages that meet borrow from each other, as English did from Norse and French (see Where English Words Come From).
So is anything "wrong"?
Yes, in a practical sense. Language has registers. The English you'd use in a job application is different from the English you'd use texting a friend, and using the wrong one for the situation costs you. Standard written English is worth mastering because it is the shared register that strangers, employers and institutions expect.
But "nonstandard" is not the same as "broken." Dialects and slang have their own consistent rules. Linguists call the attitude that some forms are simply correct and others corrupt prescriptivism, and the attitude that describes how people actually speak descriptivism. The useful stance borrows from both. Describe honestly, and choose your register on purpose.
The takeaway
Languages never stop changing, and every generation mistakes that change for decay. Latin's "errors" became Italian. Swift wanted English fixed in 1712, and it wasn't. The emphatic literally dates back to at least 1769, and it follows the same path very took from "true" to "a lot." Meanings, sounds and grammar all drift in predictable ways, driven by ease, expressiveness, identity and contact. The real skill isn't freezing the language. It is choosing the right register for your audience.
Try this: pick a word that annoys you ("literally," "like," "impact" as a verb) and look it up in a good dictionary's usage note. Find out how old the use actually is. Then decide, on purpose, when you'll use it and when you won't.
Sources & Further Reading
Sources
- Appendix Probi (227 corrections, probably written in Rome in the first half of the 300s AD, surviving in a 7th or 8th-century copy) and its entries oculus non oclus, calida non calda, vetulus non veclus: Wikipedia, "Appendix Probi." The Italian outcomes (occhio, caldo, vecchio) are from Wiktionary's etymologies.
- Swift's quotations are from the 1712 first edition of A Proposal for Correcting, Improving and Ascertaining the English Tongue (Internet Archive scan).
- The 1769 Frances Brooke citation and the OED's use of it are documented in Wikipedia's "Literally" and "Literal and figurative language," and by Language Log; the Twain and Joyce examples via Mental Floss.
- Word histories (very, nice, silly, awful, girl, meat, deer, bead, cool): Wiktionary's sourced etymologies; terrific and awful also from Wikipedia's "Semantic change."
- Great Vowel Shift dates and the bite and out vowels: Wikipedia, "Great Vowel Shift" (citing John Wells). Singular they history and Words of the Year: Wikipedia, "Singular they" (citing Huddleston & Pullum and the American Dialect Society). Labov's Martha's Vineyard study: Wikipedia, "Language change."
Go deeper
- 📘 Words on the Move: Why English Won't, and Can't, Sit Still (Like, Literally) by John McWhorter: a lively defence of language change
- 📘 Language Change: Progress or Decay? by Jean Aitchison: the classic introduction, now in its fourth edition
- 🌐 Language Log: "Frances Brooke, destroyer of English (not literally)": linguists on the 1769 literally
- 🌐 Related pieces in this library: Where English Words Come From and Grammar Without Tears, this category