This will literally slay you

Just a quick post --

Have you noticed lately that when people say "literally", they usually don't mean it? I mean, I'm literally stuck to the floor over this -- see what I mean? -- the one thing I am not is literally stuck to the floor. "Literally" is being used as some sort of intensifier, but wrongly.

Here's the latest example I've spotted. This from an article about NASA's Mars Phoenix probe that is still operational, but who knows for how much longer:

""We are literally trying to make hay as the sun shines," Barry Goldstein, Phoenix project manager at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, told reporters."

See what I mean?

The one thing they are not actually doing is trying to make hay.

And this isn't an isolated instance; we're literally up to our eyeballs in misuse of this term. And I mean that literally.

And that's the way the Ball bounces.

Literally.