A nerd/grammar snob/generic old crank wants you to stop misusing ‘literally’
Overheard at the mall: “I swear to God if I hear that Mariah Carey Christmas song one more time I am literally going to explode.” First reaction: Intense empathy.
Second, almost simultaneous reaction: No! No! No!
You are not
You are not literally going to explode, for reasons too obvious to detail, besides which you exploding would necessitate a tortuous cleanup (and probably an investigation) that could shut down the entire mall until possibly tomorrow.
Lest you think you’ve stumbled into an essay on the difference between spontaneous human combustion (not bloody likely) and spontaneous human eruption (less bloody likely), I assure you it’s nothing so high-minded as that.
This is nothing but me, your humble columnizer, acting on the longstanding mental threat that one of these days I’m literally writing a column on “literally,” specifically its ubiquitous misuse, I guess because I don’t want to be the last word nerd/grammar snob/generic old crank to do so.
For anyone who is still here, “literally” literally means “to the letter” (from the Latin littera) of what is said. You don’t mean literally when you say, as someone on the noon news did the other day, “People were literally coming out of the woodwork,” because if they’re coming out of the woodwork, they’re literally not people.
You mean figuratively or metaphorically, so don’t say, “Like, I literally died.” No you didn’t. You’re literally here, still talking incorrectly.
No one wants to be lectured on this topic, I realize, as this topic is clearly without anything approaching charisma. “Got no rizz,” as the young people say.
Historically, writers who’ve tried to explain their objection to “literally” have often misfired spectacularly if not, thankfully, literally.
“It’s a value-neutral term absent of any inherent emphasis or largesse,” went one explanation I found some months ago. “Correctly, ‘literally’ should be used when a turn of phrase usually employed in a metaphorical sense enjoys a rare moment of non-metaphorical applicability: the phrase becomes true in a literal, words-meaning-exactly-what-they-say sense.”
See?
Better to scold
Unfortunately, we’re talking about a rhetorical faux pas that shouldn’t be explained conceptually. It’s better to simply scold, I’m afraid.
“The Mets literally had Walker on the ropes.” Nope, no ropes in baseball. See boxing, where there are no Mets.
“If I were President of the United States,” said South Carolina’s Tim Scott (so don’t worry), “I would literally sign the most conservative pro-life legislation they can get through Congress.” There’s no other way to sign legislation Tim.
“I literally had the thermostat on 75 when I was sleeping.” How else? Telepathically?
The most extreme example of this little exercise probably happened in New York some years ago, when a guy who owned an East Village bar called The Continental put a sign in his window that said “Sorry, but if you say the word ‘literally’ inside the Continental, you have five minutes to finish your drink and then you must leave. If you actually start a sentence with ‘I literally’ you must leave immediately!!! This is the most overused, annoying word in the English language, and we will not tolerate it. Stop Kardashianism now!”
Not too many people noticed because it was below the sign that said, “Five shots of anything for $12,” which helped get the extremely rowdy Continental rated one of the worst bars in New York before it closed in 2018.
Still, in an interview regarding the “literally” sign, the owner insisted, of course, that he did not mean it literally. “My bar would be empty if I enforced the sign,” owner Trigger Smith told a reporter. “If you watch TV shows like Keeping Up With the Kardashians or The Bachelor, every third word they say is ‘literally,’ it’s contagious. You even hear newscasters on CNN saying it.”
And that is literally true even today, or just the other day, when in a CNN piece on still another appeal of still another gag order triggered by still another malevolent utterance by Donald J. Trump, the anchor Ana Cabrera said, “I guess the ball is now in the judge’s court, literally.”
I guess not.
The fact is, the language is an ever-evolving cultural touchstone that will inevitably undergo changes in the way it’s commonly deployed. Trying to draw some metaphorical line on which of these changes are tolerable and which aren’t ignores the fact that they are all inevitable. Already the common erroneous use of “literally” for emphasis is appearing in dictionaries.
Literally correctly
In the meantime, some of us will just quietly admire correct applications of words as they were intended. “Covid is in the air, again. Literally.” Yes, that’s how it works.
We further applaud good faith efforts as in this worthy tweet from political scientist Brian Klaas, assistant professor of global politics, University College London: “We have literally elected the Comments Section of YouTube to the most powerful offices in the world and we regularly subject serious people who spend their days trying to keep everyone safe to answering their idiotic questions.”
Maybe not literally, but damn close.