Re: OT: "literally"

[David Auerbach auerbach@xxxxxxxx]

I'm sort of tropetropic myself.
I was once talking with a friend about dead metaphors (e.g., table
leg). We idly came up with some. And then he came up with the
topper: "dead metaphor".

On Jun 8, at 7:08 PM, Patricia M. Godfrey wrote:
Michael Norman wrote:
Huddleston and Pullum (The Cambridge Grammar of the English
Language) or perhaps he led us to Quirk et all (A Comprehensive
Grammar of the English Language). At all events, H&P talk about
the above in slightly different terms: 
This is what sometimes annoys me about modern practitioners of
linguistics--a failure to see the tree for the forest. There are
three places where "literally" is commonly used: one is proper, one
is trite, and one is nonsense. The proper use is when the reader or
hearer might, with some reason, think the speaker or writer was
employing metaphor--as in my "died of fright" example. We use that
phrase so often to mean merely "extremely afraid" that if it is to
be taken au pied de la lettre, we should say so.
The second is the use exemplified by Pogue's article. What he is
saying is literally true, not a metaphor, but why would anyone
think it's a metaphor? As Carl said, it's not a mortal sin, but it
certainly is a venial one, and I fear a vicious habit among many
writers. The word does no real work in the sentence, and expresses
no more meaning than "I did, I actually did." It's like the
thousands of verys that we used to weed out of copy at Grolier.
The third use, exemplified by the Fowler-Gowers examples, is flat-
out nonsense and balderdash. It is also verbicide, because one is
using a word to mean the exact opposite of what the word has
historically meant. I do consider that the linguistic equivalent of
a mortal sin, and red pencil it whenever I see it. (Another editor
on this list and I recently had an offlist chat about this,
agreeing that we loathed the usage.)

> Almost as if we no longer trust our tropes.
Now there I think you're on to something. If you can find a copy of
Wilson Follett's Modern American Usage, read what he says about
metaphor: an excessive, and mindless, reliance on it is poisoning
our ability to tell the difference between plain statement and trope.
--
Patricia M. Godfrey
PriscaMG@xxxxxxxx


David Auerbach
Department of Philosophy & Religion
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