This is literally my first post in years

This is something that I’m sure a lot of people have noticed: there is trend toward using the word “literally” in a sentence where the speaker is not actually being literal. For instance:

“There were literally a million people at Dave’s party” (when not even 50 people showed up)
“I literally dropped dead from shock” (when of course that didn’t happen)

This new use of the word really seems to irritate people, and  “literally” has even appeared on lists of “words to ban in 2015” (e.g. TIME and TYT) Of course, those aren’t literally attempts to ban the word (ha!), but this is definitely an indication of how annoyed people are.