When you misuse the word “literally,” you are using it in the exact opposite way it was intended. When you fuck it up, you fuck it up so bad. It’s not like a little goof. It’s not like you said “penultimate” and you meant “ultimate” and you’re off by one. You completely misuse it. And you should stop using the word. Forever. Until you fuckin’ figure it out.
-David Cross, from Shut Up You Fucking Baby
[I]t is indisputably easier to be Dogmatic than Democratic.
-David Foster Wallace, from “Tense Present”
Last week, the Oxford English Dictionary drew heat for publishing the figurative use of “literally.” That is, they published the usage that would seem to run counter to its actual meaning, like in the way that Rob Lowe’s character uses it on the sitcom Parks And Recreation, e.g. “Your inbox is lit’rally filled with penises.”
The change to the 2011 OED seemed to have gone more-or-less unnoticed, at least by anyone who’s not the type of person who waits in line to get an updated dictionary every year, then futzes over inclusions and revisions.
That was until last Wednesday when Gizmodo spotted the change in Google’s built-in dictionary, noting that the Merriam-Webster and Cambridge Dictionaries had also modified their definitions to include an ostensibly incorrect usage of the word, in what The Week said “might be the most unforgivable thing dictionaries have ever done.” (They might have qualified their shrill overstatement with a rhetorical “literally” were they being at all tongue-in-cheek. Rather, the article earnestly berates “the dictionaries” for “bow[ing] to the will of the grammar-averse public.”)
The fallout over the misuse of “literally” illustrates the schism between description and prescription in linguistics, a dorky tug-of-war that’s basically the Beatles/Stones debate of usage nerdery. Descriptivists believe that language is as it’s used. Prescriptivists advocate for a standardized usage, of language As It Should Be. People who say, “Ain’t ain’t a word” are being prescriptive, though of course just saying “Ain’t aint a word” reveals the more self-evident usefulness of linguistic description: if “ain’t” is being used and I hear it and correctly receive its meaning, who’s to say it isn’t (or ain’t) a word?
Critics of prescriptive usage tend to focus on the dogmatism inherent in its ideology. By its very nature, prescriptive usage is conservative. This isn’t necessarily a political judgment. It just means that it is resistant to challenge. Prescriptivism constitutes an attempt by the lexicographer to, as Samuel Johnson put it, “embalm his language, and secure it from corruption and decay.”
Though the inclusion of the non-literal definition of literal feels ultimately descriptive (maybe even generously so), there is a measure of prescriptive stuffiness in the OED’s decision, one that’s also evident in anyone who believes the semantic sky is falling because a book has been updated to reflect how people are actually using language.
According to the OED’s revised definition, “in recent years an extended use of literally has become very common, where literally is used deliberately in non-literal contexts, for added effect.” The dictionary also notes that this usage of the word “is not acceptable in formal context, though it is widespread.” There is a measure of resigned contempt in the language here. “Though it is widespread.” If language is a virus, the OED honchos are like epidemiologists classifying some new mutation, where a word and its meaning have been topsy-turvied, where the literal literally becomes figurative. Though this is not without precedent the common misuse of the word “moot” comes to mind. As does the slang usage of “bad” to mean something like its opposite. Still. “Literal” becoming figurative suggests the total collapse between literal and figurative language.
All this hedging and defeatist brow-furrowing and exaggerative tossing-of-dirt-onto-the-grave-of-The-English-Language is snooty elitism, simply. It represents a newer, subtler shift in usage nerdery. Post-stuff like the unlikely 2003 nonfiction bestseller Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach To Punctuation, the top-rated Grammar Girl podcast, the David Cross bit quoted up-top and David Foster Wallace’s “Tense Present” essay (republished in the collection Consider The Lobster as “Authority And American Usage”), the formerly rarefied nerdiness of usage geeks has been diffused into the broader cultural fold, as pretty much every formerly esoteric stripe of nerdiness – comic collecting, Star Trek fandom, steampunk (almost) – has.
Grammar Girl, AKA Mignon Fogarty, even appeared on Oprah’s television program in 2007 to settle a debate re: the usage of possessive apostrophes in the phrase “Oprah and Gayle’s Big Adventure.” So it seems reasonable enough to say that, outside of university linguistics classes or probably non-existent Platonic ideals of British pubs where men who are all beard and chin argue Prescriptivism v. Descriptivism, usage is now properly A Thing.
Like all pseudo-subcultural preoccupations that weather the move from the sphere of recondite esoteria to that of full-on Thing-iness, usage nerdery has suffered from growing pains. Like someone who would register for a Star Trek trivia night knowing the name of Data’s android twin but not the tip-to-tip length of a warrior’s configuration Bat’leth, usage has attracted a similar stripe of wannabe philistinism, i.e. someone who would gripe about the misuse of “literally” but use “e.g.” where “i.e.” is probably more suitable. These are types for whom the superficially incorrect usage of “literally” by something like the OE-friggin’-D feels like an egregious, highly personalized slap-in-the-face, an affront to that type’s very deliberate (if probably lazy) construction of themselves as Someone Who Is Into Usage.
This is dumb. The core tenet of descriptive usage is its responsiveness to the conditions of how language is used, of it’s privileging of what language is v. what it should be. The OED’s (as well as Merriam-Webster’s, Cambridge’s and Google’s) redefinition of feels, rather productively, like a forceful push against the wave of post-Eats, Shoots & Leaves approach to laissez prescriptivism.
While worrywarts like John Sutherland at The Guardian, who of the redefinition of “literally” said, “we are like so many monkeys tossing around a Ming vase, the richest cultural property we possess,” confuse their personal pet peeves – he also objects to using “like’ as a “vocal lubricant” and to “Innit?”, basically the UK English equivalent of “Eh?” – with an actual (that is, literal) deterioration of the English language, there’s something else going on here. The non-literal use of “literally” feels to me less like a defeat for Ye Grande Ole English Language than a sophisticated advancement of it.
Rather than signifying widespread illiteracy, the figurative “literally” represents a strike against the sort of ironized disaffection that the prescriptive-types seem to presume. Take again the example of Rob Lowe in NBC’s Parks And Recreation, who uses “literally” with wavering degrees of accuracy, but with a consistent measure of enthusiasm. He’s like a modern incarnation of the hyper-ardent, unselfconscious New Sincerity: a character whose love the world cannot be hemmed in by the limits of language. Here, “literally” is used not so much to mean its opposite, but to double back on itself.
It’s as if something is so superlative that not even a superlative can contain it: “I literally shit my pants laughing,” “That dinner was so good it literally tore my head off,” etc. Nobody (or no acclimatized English-speaker, anyway) would hear these descriptions and reasonably wonder about the whereabouts of the shitty pants or how the speaker managed to reattach their head following supper. The meaning is understood as hyper-emphatic. Such forceful metaphor engenders no legitimate confusion.
As far back as 1979, with the publication of Michael Reddy’s essay “The Conduit Metaphor,” the difference between figurative and literal language has been collapsed. Reddy’s paper stated that the English language is itself largely conceived as metaphorical, with words posited as a conduit through which ideas and feelings are exchanged, while of course not literally being a conduit. So all meaning, even the most literal of literal meanings, is transmitted figuratively. As George Lakoff writes in “The Contemporary Theory Of Metaphor,” Reddy “allowed us to see…that ordinary everyday English language is largely metaphorical, dispelling once and for all the traditional view that metaphor is primarily in the realm of poetic or ‘figurative’ language.” Since Reddy, researchers have proven that listeners will actually process figurative meanings in advance of literal meanings.
So it’s not like when you hear “I literally shit my pants laughing” you think, “Oh, you shit your actual pants, no, you must be exaggerating…” It’s that you presume the exaggeration instantly. It’s not that we’re monkeys hucking around antiques from some ancient Chinese Dynasty. It’s that our monkey brains have advanced to the point that we can process the potential figurative meanings of strings of words not only as fast but faster than we can process their literal meanings. At the risk of belabouring the nerdiness analogy, we’re coming closer to that species on Star Trek: The Next Generation that communicates only in metaphor. We’re not becoming dumber and more debased. We’re becoming cleverer, more attuned to the fineries and possibilities of things as crude as words.
Our usage of language – that thing that we like to think separates us from the other animals – is not becoming more corrupted. It’s becoming more human. Literally.
