I Will Literally Change This Title When I Literally Remember What It Was Going To Be

             Hey you, don't help them to bury the light
                Don't give in / without a fight

                  - Pink Floyd, “Hey You”, The Wall

This social media wasteland, like some post-apocalyptic scorched earth, sparsely populated with roving pockets of survivors who reminisce wistfully about things like electricity and shops, regularly echoes with the loss of things we unwisely took for granted. The conversation frequently turns not only on those things lost, but to how we lost them in the first place.

I am in love with the English language and its many dialects. Despite its shortcomings (such as the gender-neutral nouns and pronouns that frustrate many for whom English is a secondary language), it teems as much with ringing oratory and towering prose as it does with much more prosaic and parochial forms of expression. I am a guitar player, not a philologist or linguist, so it might seem funny to you that I find fault with its development. But, for the sake of brevity in an article that threatens to test your endurance, I'll just spit it out. (Figuratively.)

What, not “literally”? Why, no. I am surrounded by intelligent, well-educated people who remind me (while they think they're informing me for the first time) that languages evolve, grow, shrink, often becoming or giving birth to new ones. This morning, in an ill-advised, pre-coffee post on Facebook, I lamented the death throes of the adverb “literally” and its less-commonly abused sister adjective, “literal”. Cue the harbingers of change, whose kindly admonitions cite the highly fluid nature of words, phrases and other elements of language. Yes, I'm acutely aware, and not in some curmudgeonly reactionary way, that words change, usually losing their original meanings.

In his pithy and informative essay “The Death of Words”, C. S. Lewis (in a not quite curmudgeonly, reactionary way) laments the gradual loss of meaning that words undergo over the course of generations or centuries. (Please click on the link and read it, if you never have done, or even if you have.) My concern here is not that the word “literally' is rapidly losing its dictionary definition, but that there is no adequate word with which to replace it. 

One of my favorite uses of this very specific word occurs in Sheldon Vanauken's article “The Bachelor”, first published in The Hillsdale Review in 1982, then in his book Under the Mercy in 1985, and used here without permission:

A knight bachelor was literally a free lance who used that lance under the flags of others, as opposed to a knight banneret, who led his retainers under his own flag.     

         

Now that we know the origin of the usefully evolved term “freelance”, we can touch on just how “literally” a knight could also be any sort of “lance”. Here the term is an old one, like that in which a “plump of spears” simply meant men armed with spears, or a “squadron of jet fighters” is a group of pilots, each of whom is wearing an airplane. So our knight bachelor isn't a long, pointy stick, (although Don Quixote de La Mancha may come close), but a mounted man in arms. In an extremely narrow, useless sense, he isn't “literally” a lance of any sort.

This is not what is happening to the word “literally”. I frequently hear things (usually among the less educated) like “I literally died when I got my test back with a D minus,” or “the dance floor was literally on fire.” Now it doesn't take much mental firepower to know that the student with the bad grade isn't speaking from beyond the grave, or that the dance floor was seen to be filled with energetic gyrations rather than going up in smoke. Nor is there any genuine harm in slang or colorful figures of speech. I get it. Words change, people change, cultures change.

But is that any reason to accept all of it? Suppose somebody started using the word “awesome” to describe a stick of gum or a tennis racket, rather than a 50-foot tsunami wave, or a B-52 thundering overhead at treetop level, or John Bonham's end-of-the-world drum intro to Led Zeppelin's “When The Levee Breaks”? Oops, too late. Now if I use the word “awesome” to describe the Grand Canyon or Niagra Falls, the listener as likely as not will think I'm expressing subjective approval rather than awe.

Never mind, we have other words. I confess that I now use the word “epic” where I really mean “awesome”, even though “epic” is itself in a state of flux. A cursory perusal of the thesaurus will reveal words sufficient to convey grandeur, sublimity, majesty. Awesome, dude.

But try that with “literally”. None of the synonyms listed - “actually”, “completely”, “directly”, “plainly”, “precisely”, “really”, “simply”, “truly” - quite conveys the essence, although a couple of them could be misused as I attempted to illustrate above.

This has been bothering me for a long time, but a recent journalistic gaffe is what put me over the edge (figuratively) and made me post my grievance in a dangerously decaffeinated state. The news article in question pertained to a tiny, dangerously radioactive capsule of Caesium-176 lost in the vast Australian outback by a mining firm. Upon its recovery, the authorities reported that they had “literally found the needle in the haystack”. The metaphor is a fitting one.

Except that the word “literally” transforms a metaphor (i.e., “That certainly let the cat out of the bag”) into a lie, unless you literally had a carbon-based cat in a physical bag and someone let it out, in which case somewhere, a cat thanks you. The word “virtually” would have conveyed the essence – they “virtually found the needle in the haystack”, which illustrates the apt comparison without the unnecessary implication that a physical needle in an Australian haystack would warrant an urgent search by emergency services.

Why the fuss, then? Nobody is harmed or killed by the misuse of such a word. A “gentleman”, over the course of many generations, gradually goes from being a landowner to being a man whose manners happen to please us. A “ballad” goes from being a song or poem with a repetitive narrative structure (think “Barbara Allen” or “The Wreck Of The Edmund Fitzgerald”) to being a slow-to-medium tempo pop song. (You get to pick your own here.) So the next time someone tries to explain to me the fluid nature of spoken and written languages, I'm literally going to explode. Ka-BOOOOOOOM.

See what I did there?

No, I'm not going to erupt into a deadly, noisy fireball. “He exploded” means something. (He was very angry and lost his temper.) “He literally exploded” means something unintended, and impossible, unless he's wearing a suicide vest.

C.S. Lewis points out in many of his writings that the perceived inevitability of an event is no reason to therefore accept it. Again, I quote in the knowledge that it is easier to ask forgiveness than permission:

Detestation for any ethic which worships success is one of my chief reasons for disagreeing with most communists. In my experience they tend, when all else fails, to tell me that I ought to forward the revolution because 'it is bound to come'. One dissuaded me from my own position on the shockingly irrelevant ground that if I continued to hold it I should, in good time, be 'mown down'— argued, as a cancer might argue if it could talk, that he must be right because he could kill me.

 

(CSL, “A Reply to Professor Haldane.”published in On Stories and Other Essays on Literature. 1966/1975 Harper-Collins. 117-118.)

 

It is intrinsically possible (unlike, say, teleportation, or time travel as it is popularly understood) that some sort of public movement could rally the troops and we could give the word “literally” a reprieve. Perhaps something as simple as a public statement by a public figure like Taylor Swift or LeBron James (“You're using the word 'literally' all wrong, yo!'”) could give some people pause, inspiring them to think more carefully about what they're actually saying.

I'm not the least bit optimistic. Global society shows little sign of growing subtlety or nuance. But, if I were faced with a scenario in which a news journalist, outside on location reporting on a tornado, were quite literally blown away on camera by the storm (hopefully surviving to broadcast another day), I'd like to be able to say he was “literally blown away” without being misunderstood to mean that he was really, really impressed by the tornado.

I'm tenacious. I've been married for over 30 years. I stay in bands for years on end. I lived in Venezuela for nine years. I don't give up easily. So please, not another word to the effect that I might as well give up. I have other fish to fry. Mmmm...fish...