As I was exiting Carmichael Hall yesterday, I shoved open the colossal doors to realize that it was significantly colder out than it had been when I entered just a couple of hours earlier. The group of students behind me seemed to take notice as well, zipping up sweaters with haste, and — mourning my lack of earmuffs at that moment — I couldn't help but overhear one of them complain.
"It is literally so cold outside," she said.
In her defense, it was. Shockingly so, even for Medford in October. Still, I got the inexplicable feeling that she was not using the word "literally" to avoid confusion among her friends, who might have thought "cold" was a metaphor for something else going on outside. What she meant — and I'm speculating here because it's possible that she really was considering her over-analytic friends — was that, in simplest terms, it was cold. Not just cold. Very cold. But the word "literally" is not synonymous with "very" or "extremely" or any other intensifier you've heard it used as. Over time, colloquial English and some dictionaries have falsely popularized the word as a hyperbolic adjective that serves to embellish factual statements. Derived from the Latin "litteralis," meaning "of letters," "literally" means "strict to the absolute meaning of words and distinct from allegorical, metaphorical or mystical translation." In a word, unembellished.
Of course, once the word's meaning was distorted, it continued down a path of warped evolution. People began to use "literally" not only to exaggerate the truth but also to imply — antithetically — figurativeness: "I'm literally dying from all this homework;" "I'm literally bending over backwards;" "he literally glowed." What a miraculous, terrible world that would be!
In a society that doesn't exactly preach moderation, the common use of hyperbole comes as no surprise. It is with great discontent — but not with disbelief — that I reveal the last example above to have been a quote from F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby." According to the Boston Globe, other notable enablers of a misused "literally" have included Pope, Thoreau, Dickens, Alcott and Nabokov.
Even within our figures of speech, we strive to be the most evocative, the most logical, the most believable — sometimes even to the point of discredit.
The tragedy, though, lies in what is left of the word's original meaning after its overuse. Like in the stories of "The Boy Who Cried Wolf" and the recent alcohol policy changes, the abusers have ruined it for themselves and for the rest of us, causing "literally" to be forever tainted by their excess. Now, when used literally, the once meaningful word is rendered powerless. (See what I mean?)
And "literally" — in addition to synonyms like "truly" and "really" — is not the only victim of overuse. "Awesome," for example, is a biblical adjective for the divine being, the impression of something sublime, powerful and fear-inducing. Try using it to describe just that in an essay, though, and you run the risk of having it sound more like a reaction to something mildly impressive, addressed to someone called "dude."
"Awkward" seems to inhabit a similar zone. If I'm to trust my peers, then everything is awkward: haircuts, handwriting, slight lulls in conversation, carpet stains, ceilings, everyone I meet. In effect, when something is particularly awkward — an accidental first date, Parents Weekend, finding yourself next to your boss on the Chinatown bus — the word loses its ability to aptly convey that.
I'm not proposing a hyperbole-free society; I know that suggestion would be futile. But even as we watch some of our words deteriorate into informal speech, pass through slang-ville and make the inevitable, tragic descent into the realm of unusable clichés, let's not throw "literally" out the window. Figuratively.
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Romy Oltuski is a junior majoring in English. She can be reached at Romy.Oltuski@tufts.edu.
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This article was edited from it's original print version for purposes of clarity on 10/28/09.
