incredible
In a piece in yesterday’s Guardian, Marina Hyde wrote these words: ‘the details of the Post Office scandal are so incredible as to be almost literally impossible to believe.’
Eh? Come again, Marina? That translates as ‘the details of the Post Office scandal are so incredible as to be almost literally incredible’.
Not one of her finest sentences, I think we must all agree. Of course, the word incredible has been degrading for years; I frequently see incredibly used as a synonym for very in the essays I mark. But Ms Hyde clearly does have a glimmer of the word’s original meaning here; she just can’t seem to imagine its being used in a literal sense.
And unfortunately this distracts from the important point she was making: the Post Office scandal was and still is a fucking disgrace.
Brandon Robshaw and the English Language 
And a red card for employing “literally” too. It’s usage “literally” makes me want to pull my head off when seen “literally” a billion times a day.
I think you are both being unduly harsh on Marina Hyde, who in my reading of the sentence knows exactly what she is saying and why. She knows perfectly well what the literal meaning of ‘incredible’ is and here is intentionally contrasting that literal meaning with the figurative or, if you prefer, the ‘degraded’ meaning of the word.