I was sitting in a cafe -- one of those generic pain au raisin and latte joints, with an earnest singer-songwriter soundtrack to boot -- when a kid to my left piped up: "My school gym is like literally 500 years old." His friends nodded with conviction. They understood. They felt the appalling deprivation of it all. A 500-year-old cross-trainer just isn't any good to anybody. But I wasn't going to underestimate my table-neighbour just yet. I couldn't give up on him like that. After all, I appreciated the subtle contradiction of that "like", poised on the edge of potential simile, and that bold, indicative "literally", ready-armoured for its grapple with hard fact. But then, a couple of sentences further into their criss-crossing conversation, he said: "I'm literally gutted that I failed my English mock." Ah, well, yes, quite. The country is literally going to the dogs. Actually, I rather enjoy it when people force a "literally" where the antithetical and more pretentious "figuratively" would do -- would, in fact, be more literal. But I have my limits. If you literally spray me with your false statements, do I not drown? If you literally press it upon me that the impossible has indeed happened, do I not recoil? However, one needs to be careful in diagnosing such linguistic ills. Nobody likes the queasy pedant creeping up with cold fingers, ready to clip our wings. (He tends to sit on his own in the corner of generic pain au raisin ,