I’m finding the two words my clients and interviewees overuse the most these days are, like, literally and literally like. I wrestle with this problem, especially during the interviews, because I hope to stay true to the native tone and tenor of anyone I represent on the site – it’s a conversation, right? They shouldn’t ever have to worry about grammar.

The problem is, I want their meaning, their original thought, to be more important than the way in which they said something. When someone says, “I literally died,” they creating a paradox: if they literally died, how are they still talking? That’s why I collaborate with each interviewee to protect their reputation and help them sound professional, even in the midst of casual conversation.

I’ve adopted the policy of trimming, of leaving in only as many accounts of “I was like, ‘Sweet’” and “I literally crapped my pants” as needed to capture the interviewee’s dialect, while leaving out the bulk of this literal nonsense. (As for my clients, there’s no excuse for this brand of lazy writing).

The best reasoning I can offer is McSweeney’s piece Like and Literally Make a Deal, which starts:

Down at The Last Word Saloon, Like sidled up to Literally, sat down and ordered a double.

“Why the long face?” said Like to Literally.

“I don’t know who I am anymore,” said Literally to Like.

“I hear you,” said Like…

Continue reading here, but keep in mind that the piece is for a mature audience – not for your kids and probably not for you if you have a weak stomach for pieces full of rougher language. That said, Like and Literally Make a Deal illustrates the issue very well.

And in the end, the issue is less about some snobbish proper usage and more about the life-cycle of words.

Words are organisms and on this side of the new creation, organisms die. There was a time where “lust” meant “delight in one’s beloved” or “love between spouses” Now it means… well… lust. You know, like the billboards of Victoria’s Secret models that wallpaper Times Square.

When words die off, we let them die and choose instead create new ones.

Which is why we need poetry, regardless of whether we enjoy it or understand it fully. We need sex, at very least, to create the next generation of humanity. We need poetry to create the next generation of words. As I wrote in the poem Ode to a Carpenter: 

Through ecstasy, family from family lives.
This, I believe, is genius.

I guess you could say that poetry is linguistic sex: two mixed metaphors create a new word. This means “like” and “literally” must be going through menopause.