Devotees of my column (the two or three of you left) may remember a column a couple months back about the word “literally,” which people constantly misuse. The week after that column came out I remember someone who hadn’t read it telling me that he’d just been to a party that was literally a blast.

That still makes me smile.

Anyway, the other day I discovered this website, which tracks “literally” abuses. One reader finds this sentence in William Davis’s Lincoln’s Men, in a section about how Civil War troops regarded Lincoln as a father figure: “In the regiments of the United States Colored Troops, to which he had literally given birth, there was no doubt Lincoln sat at the head of…”