‘Literally’ Bothers Me, Too. But It’s Not Literally Wrong.
(By Bill Walsh, Washington Post, 22 August 2013)
(By Bill Walsh, Washington Post, 22 August 2013)
‘We did it
guys, we finally killed English.” With that
subject line and a screen shot of Google’s
definition of “literally,” a Reddit user concerned about the language (if
not about the correct use of commas) sparked a figurative firestorm this month. The definition in question:
Literally,
Adverb
1. In
a literal manner or sense; exactly.2. Used to acknowledge that something is not literally true but is used for emphasis or to express strong feeling.
To read some
of the reaction to the second meaning, you’d think the language gods must be
crazy. On Aug. 11, 2013, your head could not literally explode, but on Aug. 12
it could. I can relate to the feelings
behind that Reddit posting, having insisted on the original meaning in my three
decades as a copy editor and in my
three books on language. But first let me count the ways my would-be fellow
stickler, and the ensuing consternation, went wrong.
In fact, the only thing new about that meaning was that
somebody had posted something on Reddit. No matter: English sometimes defies
logic, as “literally” proves, but it has nothing on the phenomenon known as
“going viral.” The Reddit post spawned Twitter mentions and blog entries and
newspaper articles. Within days, the Guardian was calling this nondevelopment “literally
the biggest semantics story of the week.”
The “news” that the Oxford English Dictionary also notes the reviled
usage made the story especially big in Britain. The OED “has revealed that it
has included the erroneous use of the word ‘literally’ after the usage became
popular,” the Daily
Mail reported, as though the dictionary’s contents had previously been kept
secret. A headline on that article was just as comical: “Definition added in
September 2011 edition, but unnoticed until this week.” It’s hard to quibble with the “unnoticed”
part, given the reaction, but 2011? A blog entry on
Oxford’s Web site does mention a 2011 online definition that reflects an update
on “literally,” but it clarifies that the disputed meaning was first
acknowledged a little earlier. As in 1903. On this side of the Atlantic, Merriam-Webster
says it followed suit in 1909.
The timing isn’t the only detail that outraged observers got
wrong. They misunderstood the role that dictionaries play. When Oxford or
Merriam-Webster lists a word or a definition, it isn’t conferring a blessing of
correctness. It’s simply recording the widespread use of that word or
definition. If you’re hearing the nonliteral “literally” or “irregardless” or
“ain’t” enough to annoy you, that’s a case for including them in dictionaries,
not against it. As linguists and
lexicographers and even copy editors pointed out amid the “literally” outrage,
a usage that is widespread and established enough to land in dictionaries isn’t
the only argument for letting the word evolve. Good writers have used
“literally” nonliterally as far back as the 18th century. Charles Dickens used it.
So did James Joyce, Louisa May Alcott, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Vladimir
Nabokov.The word can mean both its original meaning and the opposite, which might seem odd, but so can verbs such as “sanction” and “dust.” Its secondary meaning makes for hyperbole, but so do many instances of “really” and “truly” and “completely” and “totally” that don’t seem to bother anybody. And it’s almost always clear whether the word is being used in its original sense or, as that Google definition puts it, “for emphasis or to express strong feeling.” Still, that Reddit post wasn’t written in a vacuum. The new definition is well established, but so is a strong disdain for it. The usage has become a pop-culture punch line. It’s fodder for comic strips and stand-up comics. Vice President Biden makes headlines with his fondness for it. The usage fills a chapter of my new book, “Yes, I Could Care Less: How to Be a Language Snob Without Being a Jerk.” However persuasive the historical and linguistic justifications, there’s something uniquely absurd about using the one word that most clearly means “I am not making this up” when you are, in fact, making something up.
Even dispassionate observers draw some lines between what’s
technically defensible and what’s preferable. Several of the linguists,
lexicographers and other scholarly types who rolled their eyes (perhaps even
literally) at what one called this “tempest in a teapot” had previously
acknowledged no great love for the secondary meaning. John
McIntyre, a longtime Baltimore Sun editor and passionately dispassionate
language blogger: “Let the record show that, for my part, I prefer to use literally
in its literal sense.” Ben Zimmer,
a language writer and former dictionary editor: “Still, that doesn’t mean I
think non-literal literally is fine and dandy — I wouldn’t use it
myself, and when I catch others using it I occasionally cringe.”
Some of us cringe more than occasionally. We have a
heightened sensitivity to the way words are used. We are the language snobs.
The sticklers. The peevers. I found perhaps the one calling where my neurosis
could be used constructively. It’s probably not normal to write
“obsessive-compulsive” on a job application. But I did that in applying to join
my college newspaper. Some of us got
this way because nuns assaulted us with rulers or because our parents corrected
us to “may I” every time we said “can I,” or “lie down” every time we said “lay
down.” Neither of those things happened to me — I just had a dad with a knack
for spelling and a mom who did and does enjoy pouncing on malapropisms. I was
raised, not “reared.”
I can’t vouch for all language peevers. There is no Peevers
Anonymous. Perhaps there should be. (“The meetings literally last forever, but
we could care less!”) But too many of us are caught up in rules-that-aren’t,
striving to stamp out the passive voice and omit needless words in the name of
Strunk and White, without understanding why passive voice is often appropriate
or which words are truly needless. I
would never point it out directly, because I am not a jerk, but I hear from
fans of my books who, while professing agreement with my rants, commit one or
two of my most petted peeves. And then there’s Muphry’s — not Murphy’s — Law:
It states that a piece of writing about usage errors will inevitably contain a
usage error. (When you find the error or errors in this article,
congratulations.)
I try to be an enlightened stickler. I recognize many of the
so-called rules for the nonsense they are, and I fight for the right to split
infinitives, end sentences with prepositions, begin sentences with conjunctions
and use “hopefully” in that way that a lot of people hate. This occasionally
puts me in a place where I’m meta-peeving: Sometimes when I spot an awkwardly
unsplit infinitive, I know I’m looking at the work of a misguided fellow
stickler. If I find out the stickler is the writer, I’m relieved. But it’s
usually an editor, and that makes me sad. First, do no harm.
Peevers are sometimes misguided, but we’re generally
harmless. Our exasperated sighs are likely to be part of a role we’re playing —
props, in a sense, like a fop’s bow tie and fedora. We know deep down that people aren’t doing
things just to annoy us, even if every trend the linguists call inexorable
brings to mind an infuriating counterexample. (If the unfortunate spelling
“email” truly reflects a mass hatred of hyphens and love of onewordification,
then why do people turn the perfectly good word “aha” into “a-ha” and “ah-ha”
and “ah-hah”? If people choose the “bandana” spelling over the vastly superior
“bandanna” because of a similar quest for brevity, why does “traveling” so
often get turned into the British “travelling”?)
Last month on Slate, The Washington Post’s sister (for now)
Web site, a brave writer named Dana Stevens wrote a 1,400-word rant
against flip-flops. It resonated with me, and not only because I share
Stevens’s feelings about flip-flops. How is using “literally” nonliterally like
wearing shower-and-beach footwear outside its natural habitat? Well, Stevens
threw in some nods to function, citing potential arch-support problems in much
the same way that sticklers cite potential ambiguity, but it was clear that she
was practicing peevery, not podiatry. In language as in fashion, outside the
stylebooks that publications employ and the dress codes that some institutions
enforce, there is no official list of rules. And as the comments made clear in
the case of flip-flops, there will be those who do the things that annoy us and
those who don’t.
For those who find cultural criticism, whether of language
or of dress, unseemly, there’s good news: Practically nobody listens to such
critics. Language and fashion will go where they go, and Dana Stevens articles
and Bill Walsh books are more likely to reinforce opinions than to change them.
Whether you mutter about anal-retentive authoritarians who should mind their own
business, or you sniff about slobs who should pay more attention and have some
respect for tradition, ultimately both sides are likely to coexist peacefully.
At the end of the day, to use a cliche I’ve railed against, it’s important to
separate style from substance. So don’t
be a jerk.
Oxford
Dictionaries Adds ‘Twerk,’ ‘Selfie,’ And Other Words That Make Me Vom
(By Michael Dirda,
Washington Post, 23 August 2013)
Can I speak
srsly here? Style asked me to look over a list of the latest words, such as
that one (which simply means “seriously”), that were added Wednesday to a
resource called Oxford Dictionaries Online. Apparently the ODO offers such
linguist updates every quarter, being a dictionary of the moment, a lexicon of
contemporary usage. Nearly all the new words listed are current slang employed
by young people and digital junkies, usually the same thing. This is certainly not my world. FOMO, for example, means
“fear of missing out: anxiety that an exciting or interesting event may be
happening elsewhere, often aroused by posts seen on a social media website.” I
can confidently say that I have never experienced FOMO in quite this form,
since I don’t participate in any social media. Still, like most people, I know
that the real party will always be happening in the next room.
Back in my day, the revered 1960s — cue “Where have all the
flowers gone?” — we never trusted anyone over 30; these days, it would be
unseemly, even pathetic for anyone older than 30 to use a term like “squee” or
“twerk” or “vom.” Or even to be aware of them and their meanings. I certainly
wasn’t. Such words are useful — all words are useful — but most of this vogue
lingo is wholly restricted to a certain demographic (kids with smartphones) and
a certain context (instant messaging and Twitter).
“Squee,” by the way, is an exclamation of “great delight or
excitement.” According to the ODO, it originated from “squeal.” No doubt, but I
think the screech of a squeegee on a windshield might also play its part.
“Twerk” means to “dance to popular music in a sexually provocative manner
involving thrusting hip movements and a low squatting stance.” I’m told by an
informed source — my youngest son — that it is associated chiefly with the
actress Miley Cyrus. It would be wildly inappropriate for a gentleman my age to
recognize, let alone employ, this word. I’ll stick with “bump and grind.” Vom
is simply a shortened form of vomit. It saves two characters when twittering.
Or tweeting. Whatever.
Like so much digital terminology, many of these new words
are ugly. Ever since the computer age got going, it has gravitated to
repulsive-sounding terminology, starting with all forms of “blog.” Writer,
author, even journalist: All these sound like admirable professions. But
blogger. Yech. I know the term’s origin — Web log — and I understand how people
naturally gravitate to contractions, but the end result is still repulsive.
Don’t even get me started on “the blogosphere.”
Unfortunately, rebarbative lingo seems here to stay: Jorts
are defined as “shorts made of denim fabric” and presumably arose by eliding
“jeans” and “shorts.” I imagine that “Klaatu barada nikto” is the international
clothing chain behind “Jorts.” (My little joke: Think “The
Day the Earth Stood Still.”) Widely used already, a MOOC is “a course of
study made available over the Internet without charge to a very large number of
people.” This phenomenon is clearly here to stay, but “I’m taking a MOOC”
sounds disgustingly lavatorial. A “selfie” is a photograph of oneself,
typically “with a smartphone or webcam and uploaded to a social media website.”
When I first glanced at the list, I thought it said “selkie,” and I was
impressed that Scottish merpeople were now on the cutting edge.
A few of this quarter’s new words seem not at all new. Or
maybe they’ve only recently made their way to the dreaming spires of Oxford. A
“blondie” — meaning, in dictionary language, “a small square of dense, pale-coloured
cake, typically of a butterscotch or vanilla flavour” — has surely been around
as long as its darker brother, the brownie. Didn’t actress Jean Seberg have a
“pixie cut” 50 years ago in “Breathless”?
It can’t be a new word, can it? “Balayage,” a particular way of highlighting
the hair, seems like something that a French hairdresser would toss around and
nobody else. “Space tourism” simply joins two familiar words together in a new
context. It’s a fresh concept but hardly a new word. Same goes for “street
food.”
I’ve read that the term “omnishambles” derives from a
British television show and was voted the most popular new word of last year.
(Who does this voting, and where do they cast their ballots?) “Omnishambles” is
defined as “a situation that has been comprehensively mismanaged, characterized
by a string of blunders and miscalculations.” Other than being an apt summary
of my life, I don’t see how this word differs from plain old “shambles.” Which
also describes my house. It’s a real
pity that former federal prosecutor Jim Letten’s recent use of “hobbit” — to
mean roughly sleazebag or scum — just missed this quarter’s cutoff time. I hope
it catches on. It comes trippingly off the tongue as a term of derision.
(Sorry, Bilbo.) I’m sure it’ll appear next quarter. In truth, it seems about as
hard to get into the ODO as it does to get into Dr. Nick’s Hollywood Upstairs
Medical College.
Still, of all the new words added to the Oxford Dictionaries
Online, perhaps the most chilling is the acronym “TL;DR.” I sometimes fear that
everything I value in the way of literature and scholarship will be casually
dismissed with those letters: “Too Long; Didn’t Read.” Sorry, Leo. Sorry,
Marcel. One last observation: Most of
these new words and acronyms are probably never meant to be spoken by actual
human beings. They live and breathe only on the tiny screen. There, in the
strange telegraphese of the smartphone, they quickly convey information and
shrill emotion through typographic grunts and squeals. Or, rather, squees. No
doubt they have their place, but let them stay there.
Weighing
In On ‘Literally,’ But Figuratively, Of Course
(By Gene Weingarten,
Washington Post, September 6, 2013)
To the
Nobel Prize committee:
I am writing
to suggest that you make your first posthumous award in literature, and that it
go to Ambrose Bierce, the 19th-century American satirist. I have always admired
Bierce, but I do not write merely as a fan; I write to acquaint you with what
may well be the greatest feat of long-range prognostication in the history of
the written word. While reading Bierce
essays recently, my friend Jack Shafer discovered the following passage:
“Nothing is more certain than that within a few years the word ‘literally’ will
mean ‘figuratively.’ And this because journalists, with a greater desire to
write forcibly than ability to do so, habitually use it in that sense.” (He was
talking about this sort of imbecilic formulation: “I literally died of
laughter.”)
Bierce wrote this prescient passage in 1871. As you may be
aware from recent publicity, the Oxford English Dictionary — arbiter of all
things English — has finally, inevitably, sanctioned the use of “literally” to
mean its precise opposite. It is a hapless surrender to, figuratively, eons of
careless misuse. (Note my correct use of
the verb “sanction,” which has also been corrupted over the years to mean “to
outlaw,” its precise opposite; the OED has been complicit in permitting this,
as well. And don’t get me started on “imply” and “infer,” which most
dictionaries now say can be used interchangeably, which is no different from
allowing “pitch” to be synonymous with “catch.” This, too, was occasioned by
sustained years of misuse.)
I am not a language tyrant, nor do I disrespect dictionary
editors, to whom falls the distasteful duty of reading and listening to what is
being widely uttered and written and adding these things to the lexicon merely
on the basis of ubiquity. So, although I may cringe at “blogosphere” and
“webinar” and, sigh, “whatevs,” I do not protest their appearance in
dictionaries. But one must draw the line somewhere, and to me, that line is
crossed when antonyms are certified for use as synonyms. It is rewarding
vapidity. It is celebrating vapidity. It would be like your giving the Nobel
Prize in medicine to the president of the Hair Club for Men.
(I should mention that defenders of “literally” as
“figuratively” note that it has been used that way once or twice by people with
serious writing chops, such as Charles Dickens and Jane Austen. That no more
makes it right or acceptable than it makes it right for you to annihilate
100,000 people with a bomb just because Harry Truman once did it.) So, my point is that if you posthumously give
Ambrose Bierce the 2013 Nobel Prize in Literature, you will be sending an
important message to lexicographers worldwide.
Finally, I know that the Nobel committee tends to reward
bodies of work; rest assured, Bierce successfully predicted much more than the
trashing of “literally.” I’ll leave you with one more bit. Upon departing on
horseback for Mexico in 1913, at the age of 71, to bear witness to Pancho
Villa’s revolution, Bierce wrote this to a niece: “Good-bye. If you hear of my
being stood up against a Mexican stone wall and shot to rags please know that I
think that a pretty good way to depart his life. It beats old age, disease, or
falling down the cellar stairs. To be a Gringo in Mexico — ah, that is
euthanasia!” It was the last anyone
heard of him. The old gringo’s body has never been found.
The Period Is Pissed.
When Did Our Plainest Punctuation
Mark Become So Aggressive?
(By Ben Crair, the New Republic, 25 November 2013)
The period was always the humblest of
punctuation marks. Recently, however, it’s started getting angry. I’ve noticed
it in my text messages and online chats, where people use the period not simply
to conclude a sentence, but to announce “I am not happy about the sentence I
just concluded.” Say you find yourself
limping to the finish of a wearing workday. You text your girlfriend: “I know
we made a reservation for your bday tonight but wouldn’t it be more romantic if
we ate in instead?” If she replies,
we could do that
Then you can ring up Papa John’s and order
something special. But if she replies,
we could do that.
Then you should probably drink a cup of
coffee: You’re either going out or you’re eating Papa John’s alone.
This is an unlikely heel turn in
linguistics. In most written language, the period is a neutral way to mark a
pause or complete a thought; but digital communications are turning it into
something more aggressive. “Not long ago, my 17-year-old son noted that many of
my texts to him seemed excessively assertive or even harsh, because I routinely
used a period at the end,” Mark Liberman, a professor of linguistics at the
University of Pennsylvania, told me by email. How and why did the period get so
pissed off?
It might be feeling rejected. On text and
instant message, punctuation marks have largely been replaced by the line
break. I am much more likely to type two separate messages without punctuation:
sorry about last night
next time we can order little caesars
Than I am to send a single punctuated
message:
I’m sorry about last night. Next time we
can order Little Caesars.
And, because it seems begrudging, I would never
type:
sorry about last night.
next time we can order little caesars.
“The unpunctuated, un-ended sentence is
incredibly addicting,” said Choire Sicha, editor of the Awl. “I feel liberated
to make statements without that emphasis, and like I'm continuing the
conversation, even when I'm definitely not.”
Other people probably just find line breaks more efficient. An American University study of college students’ texting and
instant messaging habits found they only used sentence-final punctuation 39
percent of the time in texts and 45 percent of the time in online chats. The
percentages were even lower for “transmission-final punctuation”: 29 percent
for texts and 35 percent for IMs. The same is likely true of Twitter, where the
140-character limit has made most punctuation seem dispensable.
“In the world of texting and IMing … the
default is to end just by stopping, with no punctuation mark at all,” Liberman
wrote me. “In that situation, choosing to add a period also adds meaning
because the reader(s) need to figure out why you did it. And what they infer,
plausibly enough, is something like ‘This is final, this is the end of the
discussion or at least the end of what I have to contribute to it.’” It’s a remarkable innovation. The period was
one of the first punctuation marks to enter written language as a way to
indicate a pause, back when writing was used primarily as a record of (and
script for) speech. Over time, as the written word gained autonomy from the
spoken word, punctuation became a way to structure a text according to its own
unique hierarchy and logic. While punctuation could still be used to create or
suggest the rhythms of speech, only the exclamation point and question mark
indicated anything like what an orator would call “tone.”
“Explicit representations of the emotional
state of the person doing the writing are fairly rare,” said Keith Houston,
author of Shady Characters: The Secret Life of Punctuation, Symbols,
and Other Typographical Marks. Writers, linguists, and philosophers
have occasionally tried to invent new punctuation marks to ease the difficulty
of inflecting tone in writing.1 The
“irony mark,” in particular, has been proposed many times. But none of these efforts has
been successful. Now, however,
technology has led us to use written language more like speech—that is, in a
real-time, back-and-forth between two or more people. “[P]eople are
communicating like they are talking, but encoding that talk in writing,” Clay
Shirky recently told Slate. This might help explain the rise of
the line break: It allows people to more accurately emulate in writing the
rhythm of speech. It has also confronted people with the problem of tone in
writing, and they're trying to solve it with the familiar punctuation marks
that the line break largely displaced.
It's not just the period. Nearly everyone
has struggled to figure out whether or not a received message is sarcastic. So
people began using exclamation points almost as sincerity markers: “I really
mean the sentence I just concluded!” (This is especially true of exclamation
points used in sequence: “Are you being sarcastic?” “No!!!!!”) And as problems
of tone kept arising on text and instant message, people turned to other
punctuation marks on their keyboards rather than inventing new ones.2
The question mark has similarly outgrown its traditional purpose. I notice it
more and more as a way to temper straightforward statements that might
otherwise seem cocky, as in “I’m pretty sure he likes me?” The ellipsis, as Slate noted, has come to serve a whole range of
purposes. I often see people using it as a passive-aggressive alternative to
the period’s outright hostility—an invitation to the offender to guess at his
mistake and remedy it. (“No.” shuts down the conversation; “No…” allows it to
continue.)
Medial punctuation, like the comma and
parentheses, has yet to take on emotional significance (at least as far as I've
observed). And these newfangled, emotional uses of terminal punctuation haven't
crossed over into more traditional, thoughtful writing. (I have used the period
throughout this story, and I’m in a perfectly pleasant mood.) Perhaps one day
it will, though, and our descendants will wonder why everyone used to be so
angry. For posterity's sake, then, let my author bio be clear: Ben Crair is a story editor at The New
Republic!
Hey, there is a broken link in this article, under the anchor text - American University study
ReplyDeleteHere is the working link so you can replace it - https://selectra.co.uk/sites/default/files/pdf/Text-Messaging-and-IM.pdf