not literally

In The Plan of a Dictionary of the English Language in 1747, Samuel Johnson lamented the ineluctable truth about words, i.e. that their meanings are constantly changing:

And who upon this survey can forbear to wish, that these fundamental atoms of our speech might obtain the firmness and immutability of the primogenial and constituent particles of matter, that they might retain their substance while they alter their appearance, and be varied and compounded, yet not destroyed.

But this is a privilege which words are scarcely to expect; for, like their author, when they are not gaining strength, they are generally losing it. Though art may sometimes prolong their duration, it will rarely give them perpetuity, and their changes will be almost always informing us, that language is the work of man, of a being from whom permanence and stability cannot be derived.

Far be it from me to advocate syntactical conservatism, but one of our most valuable words is experiencing an intolerable slippage into its opposite, and all of us who care about language must do what we can to stop it. I've always appreciated the ceaseless engine of innovation that is language. For me, the 1980's in particular stand out as a period of great ferment as hip hop shook up the English-speaking world. We are all the richer for having 'mad' as an adverb (as in 'mad phat'), 'science' restored to its original Latin meaning (as in 'dropping science'), and 'dis' as a diminutive for 'disrespect'. But there is one word whose literal meaning cannot be allowed to change, and that word is 'literal'.

People are increasingly using 'literally' to mean 'figuratively'. Here is an instance from the floor of the U.S. Senate on March 9, 2007. The speaker was Senator Mary Landrieu, Democrat of Louisiana:

Now, normally this redtape is a nuisance. We work through it. It is inconvenient. It is a nuisance. But we just sort of move through the redtape of Government. But in this case, it is literally a noose that is around the necks of people, of business owners, large and small, family members—strangling their efforts to recover their communities that were devastated.

Is it time for Northern troops to occupy Louisiana again as they did during the Reconstruction? Is someone literally lynching people down South with nooses made of literal red tape? Senator Landrieu seems to think so.

Figuratively, the noose has enormous suggestive power, especially in discussions of government's treatment of African-Americans in the South. The senator's topic was the obstacles impeding post-hurricane rebuilding on the Gulf Coast. The 'noose' could be an apt metaphor for the way that the federal government under Bush and Cheney has squeezed the life out of New Orleans. But literally?

As a literary scholar and educator, I get a lot of mileage (no, not literal mileage) out of the difference between the literal and the figurative. One of my standard parlor tricks (no, not a literal parlor) in the classroom is to de-familiarize everyday figures, like the synecdoche in 'Get your ass over here', or to revive dead metaphors. My favourite is 'planet', thought today to mean a big chunk of matter that orbits a star. The Greek word for those bright lights was 'planetos', literally 'wanderer'. They called them wanderers or wandering stars because they moved idiosyncratically against the backdrop of the celestial sphere of all the other fixed stars that rotated as one. Thus, when we call a big chunk of orbitting matter a planet, we are using a dead metaphor, for the word literally meant 'wanderer'.

If we lose the literal meaning of 'literal', we would be depriving our language of one of the two words, the other being 'figurative', that most help us understand how language does and does not work. The loss would be, to the entire English-speaking world, a straitjacket—no, not literally, but figuratively.