A plague of literal-mindedness

The tendency to take words at face value is more widespread than ever before.

In his autobiography, the novelist Compton Mackenzie mentions one of his more curious pastimes. He enjoyed scouring newspapers for various examples of where the term “literally” had been misused. In 1928, he wrote a letter to the Evening Standard in which he noted some of his favourites, including the journalist who had claimed that a criminal “as a matter of fact had literally gone to pieces after his arrest”.

Soon after Mackenzie’s letter was published, he was inundated with examples that had been spotted by readers elsewhere. One came from the future Home Secretary, Sir Herbert Samuel, also an avid collector of “literallys”. These included:

“He is literally here, there and everywhere” – Daily News

“He was born, literally, with printer’s ink in his veins, and was an outstanding character in the field of local journalism” – Farmworker Journal

“To this day I see his face exactly as I saw it then – stricken and defiant, blazing with an anger that seemed literally volcanic” – J. A. Spender, Life, Journalism and Politics, vol. 1

“The monster’s death in an avalanche on the Jura mountains is noisy enough to literally bring down the house” – review of a production of Frankenstein in the Manchester Guardian

If this last example did literally happen, one wonders how many members of the audience perished in the accident? Mackenzie remarked that was a particularly satisfying “literally” because it had clearly been dropped in to avoid a split infinitive. The Manchester Guardian was later to become the Guardian, so it would seem that the quality of writing has not improved with time.

Or perhaps I am being literal-minded in assuming that “literally” ought to be understood literally. After all, the Merriam-Webster online dictionary has recently added a new definition of the word. The original meaning is still there – “in a literal sense or manner” – but there is also now a secondary definition: “In effect: virtually – used in an exaggerated way to emphasize a statement or description that is not literally true or possible.” So apparently these days literally can literally mean figuratively. God help us all.

Mackenzie and Herbert were collecting “literallys” almost a century ago, but I doubt that they could possibly keep up in our modern age. How often have we heard activists claiming that their political opponents are “literally Hitler”, even though only Hitler was literally Hitler. Or how about the claim that “words are literal violence” or that anyone who is willing to publicly admit that human beings cannot change sex is an “actual fascist”? Those who speak in this way are not simply demonstrating their cognitive shortcomings, they are also butchering the language. (That’s a metaphor, by the way; I do not mean to imply that anyone has been hacking away at a copy of the dictionary with a meat cleaver.)

Literal-minded people have always existed, but this tendency is especially pronounced among today’s puritanical activists. In the publishing industry, an entire new profession has been invented for the congenitally literal-minded in the form of “sensitivity readers”. These envious hobgoblins pore over authors’ manuscripts and demand revisions should any aspect carry the potential to cause offence. The poet Kate Clanchy has written about her experience with sensitivity readers, and noted how one objected to the image of a “disfigured” landscape. They could not see the metaphor, only an ableist slur.