101 YEARS OLD AND STILL LITERALLY LITERATE...

NOT long ago I heard a young lady on a train telling another woman about an altercation with a colleague at work. Telling of her reaction at one moment, she said: “My head literally exploded”.

A couple of days ago I heard a girl at a bus stop talking on a mobile phone about her state of exhaustion. “I am literally shattered,” she said.

On both occasions I winced and wished that I could have seen the first lady’s head exploding and the girl shattering into pieces before me.

Yesterday, worst of all, I was reading the latest book by the Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami. Entitled Killing Commendatore, it is, even for the man who is, in my opinion, the greatest living novelist, a stunningly brilliant work of imagination. I shall not even try to summarise the plot of its 681 pages but I can assure you that there is not a dull moment in them.

On page 575 however I encountered a moment of pure horror. “Terror engulfed me,” the hero tells us. “I was literally nailed to the spot.”

Literally nailed? Literally? Murakami, I am sure, could not himself be guilty of such a solecism. It must, I told myself, be something introduced by the otherwise excellent translators. Until then, I thought that Philip Gabriel and Ted Goossen were doing a fine job translating the book. I do not speak Japanese myself but I felt confident that the fluent way in which they captured the mysticism of the story did justice to Murakami’s prose. But one of them at least should have been linguistically sensitive enough not to use “literally” to mean “metaphorically” which is its opposite.

I know that Jeremy Butterfield, in his recent fourth edition of Fowler’s Dictionary of Modern English Usage, sanctions the use of “literally” to mean “figuratively” but have always stoutly maintained that his doing so is a disservice to the English language.

Words, of course, change meaning. We must accept that language is fluid and that over time words acquire the meaning that is ascribed to them by their users. Lexicographers will maintain that changes in meaning are “sanctioned by usage” but when such usage diminishes the language itself, I believe we purists (or “pedants” as we are sometimes called) should fight vigorously against it.

There is no need to say “literally” just to add emphasis to the word it precedes. We have plenty of other words that perform the same function. I would not have objected to any of “completely” or “absolutely” or “totally” or “utterly” in the examples I have given above. “Literally” means “to the letter”, or “in its purest sense, free from metaphor or allusion”. Using it as just another word of emphasis deprives us of a chance to use the word properly without ambiguity.

Using “decimate” to mean “utterly destroy”, when its true meaning is “to reduce by one tenth”, or using “enormity” to mean “hugeness”, when it really means “moral depravity”, or using “infer” to mean “imply”, are all not “sanctioned by usage”. They are sanctioned only by ignorance. They are, if you like, literally illiterate.