I realize that I'm a grammar nit-picker. Sure, I don't construct well-wrought sentences on this blog (I like to mimic my own speech patterns, is all), but I get upset about the classics: the wrong there/their/they're, basic misspellings, misplaced apostrophes, etc. Sometimes my local stations run these commercials for a store named--and this is the truth (the horrible, horrible truth)--"Forever Your's Jewelry." "YOUR'S" IS NOT EVEN A WORD. THEY MUST HAVE IT PRINTED ON A PROFESSIONAL SIGN AND THEIR CHECKS AND EVERYTHING. SWEET MERCIFUL HEAVENS, IT IS AGONY.
But that's not what this entry is about. It's about something much more widespread and insidious.
Word definitions are tricky. Over time, they migrate. For instance, in Hamlet (and in general, circa Shakespeare's time), the word "doubt" had the meaning we now give to "suspect." And in a work from the Seventeenth Century that I've been reading, "sad" just means "solemn." These things happen.
Sometimes it's OK if a word drifts from its dictionary meaning. Example: for the hardest-core grammar nazis, "hopefully" only means "full of hope." As in, "She waited hopefully by the phone." Its casual use has clearly moved away from that, meaning "one would hope that...", and I think that's fine. There's no other word that fills the niche of casual "hopefully."
However I will not, nay, CANNOT, stand idly by while people continue to use "literally" wrong. It's supposed to mean "this is the pure truth, it is unvarnished and without hyperbole. It may sound like I'm exaggerating, but I want to emphasize that I am not." No other word does that! Yet people insist on using "literally" just like every other word that can be used to emphasize. They use it like "very" or "really" or "totally" (which, when you look at them, have clearly also been through the same semantic bleaching). They use it to hyperbolize, when that is the opposite of what it's for. When people "literally" to mean "metaphorically," they are killing the word "literally." We already have lots of words that just emphasize and exaggerate. We don't need more of those. We need "literally" to mean "literally," because if "literally" doesn't do its specific job, nothing else will.
Stand with me! We must refuse to succumb to the temptation to use "literally" when we aren't talking about something that really, genuinely, truly, honest-to-goodness happened!
Sunday, February 8, 2009
A Crime Against the English Language
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5 comments:
Tell this to Joe Biden. But yes, this is a growing plague.
This is literally, like, the most awesomest blog post ever. ;)
Have you ever heard of Wordsplosion? http://wordsplosion.com/ It simultaneously makes me laugh and cry. =)
Ooh, you're right, Wordsplosion is good. I like this one: http://wordsplosion.com/get-right/
I think it comes from too many clever journalists who originally used it correctly, but with bad puns that its hearers ignored.
"The construction of a 300-page poem starting in media res and using elevated language is a process of literally epic proportions, but here we have a poet who managed it--and got published. Joe the poet, tell us what the experience was like..."
What people picked up on was the element "literally epic proportions," not realizing that the newscaster was talking about, er, an epic.
Or "and from the perspective of this one town in Death Valley it seems that climate change will remain, literally, a very hot issue for years to come." There "literally" is a stretch, but it still indicates that (har-har) physical as well as emotional temperatures will rise.
I'm generally a fan of language change, but I'll admit it annoys me. There are an immense number of words that mean "immensely."
On the other hand, I don't mind the same process happening with "cretin/idiot/retard/developmentally challenged &c." because the coining of a new term per generation really does, in a small way, help humans to look at people with varying degrees of intelligence as equally human.
Amen Sister.
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