Not to be taken literally
Toxic dumping: just a metaphor!
September 17, 2009 21 comments
British oil trader Trafigura has suddenly agreed to pay compensation to 31,000 people harmed by its 2006 dumping of toxic waste in Côte d’Ivoire. Trafigura had previously insisted that its waste was “absolutely not dangerous”, but now internal emails obtained by the Guardian (pdf) show that its employees knew it was dangerous.
Trafigura’s official response to the leak is intriguingly creative. First, of course, it claims that the emails have been taken “out of context“, but not satisfied with this boilerplate denial, it goes further: the emails, it adds, are “not to be taken literally”.
This plea has impressively wide-ranging applications. Have the police found chat transcripts of how you planned to blow up that public monument that exploded, or your diary of exactly how you murdered thirteen people who were found dead in a park? Well, you retort smugly, such things are not to be taken literally. You were merely indulging, as is every citizen’s right, in some literary jouissance, playing innnocently with allegory and synecdoche!
Plus, Trafigura does have a point. After all, one of the emails says:
We need to get some good info regarding the above to try to plan the handling better and avoid choking on this stuff.
The employee’s desire to “avoid choking on this stuff” is, surely, not to be taken literally — after all, they weren’t actually planning to drink their own toxic waste.
What else ought not to be taken literally, readers?
The Booker Prize.
The word ‘literally’.
*splutters coffee
Warning: reading the witty comments on unspeak.net over breakfast can cause a mess.
My previous remark that “bad writing is why you didn’t sell a zillion copies of Unspeak and why my Zenobia book ended up pulped.”
Ah, ‘literally’ again. We have had fun with this in the past. I have been meaning to write a sequel to my own ‘literally’ piece.
The second contemporary offense against ‘literally’ is to use it to mean literally nothing. Here are some examples from U.S. Vice-President Joseph Biden’s remarks after Senator Edward Kennedy’s death.
Yes, he literally sat next to Kennedy, which is to say nothing more than that he sat next to Kennedy.
Yes, it aids meaning to say things like ‘in the literal sense, literally—literally’. Otherwise, what might we think he meant?
Perhaps the problem is that Biden and others mistake figurative language for hyperbole or fabrication even, as if to say: I am not imagining it. I literally would not be vice-president if not for Kennedy. Biden may be right about that, or should I say ‘literally right’?
Again, I infer anticipated disbelief: no, it literally happened. But this is not what ‘literally’ means. And no, I am not going to give in to the temptation of saying, ‘It is literally not what “literally” means.’
Biden is an easy mark, but this abuse is rife these days.
http://www.boston.com/news/pol.....edy_r.html
Jeff, people do that because, as you have noted, so many other people use “literally” figuratively that in order to use it correctly one has to *point out* that one is using it correctly. Its constant abuse means that it has lost its impact and can’t be used without clarification without its meaning and purpose getting lost in the noise.
I meant to add that all of those (except perhaps the first) are legitimate cases for using “literally”–people often say “changed the circumstances” or “wouldn’t be here today” or “called every day” to express something else that isnt “literally” what they said (such as perhaps “improved potential prospects” or “He helped me” or “expressed a great deal of concern and called often”).
If you want to express that someone really did do those things literally, there’s no other word except “literally”–but that word has been watered down by incorrect usage so much that it has to be emphasized by pointing it out. Sad, but true. Use “literally” without emphasis and nobody will know, unless they know you well, whether you literally mean “literally” or if you’re using it incorrectly to mean “figuratively” like figuratively everyone else.
A Johnson beat me to it (and said it better). Biden is a notorious serial abuser of “literally”, and I chuckled to see him meticulously assuring us that he really (or literally) meant it in these cases.
This speech was very unique. You may think this a pretty extreme position, but there are more words subject to meaning-losing abuse than the usual purists ever mention. There’s always an identical word you can use in place of the erroneous one.
“These [curling stones] are made in a factory so unique that there is only one other like it in the world.” — From a Disney informational short subject about Scotland, sometime in the 1950s
Jeff, in all your examples, Biden is actually using ‘literally’ in the literal sense. Alright so he’s using it to say pointless, vacuous things, but even with ‘every day’ he seems to be getting at each and every calendar day rather than just ‘frequently’. That’s how I read it, anyway. You seem to be confusing abuse with overuse.
And look at this lovely wedge of unspeak:
Does the ‘A’ stand for ‘Samuel’ by any chance? Who are you to go telling people what is ‘correct’ and what is ‘abuse’ or just ‘noise’? What you mean is not ‘correct’ but ‘standard according to my particular tastes’. There’s even more here:
Surely the problem here is that ‘literally’ is gaining meaning, not losing it. What you mean is that the meaning you like is being diluted by other people using extra ones. Reminds me of all those gripes about “British identity”.
Anyway, I’ve written a rebuttal of Jeff’s post if anyone’s interested. Plug over. Rant over.
I am literally thirsty for a beer.
Is “gaining [or losing] meanings” the same as “gaining meaning”? I think not.
“Fish” did not lose meaning when it ceased to be applied to whales. Since it was restricted to a more specific sense, while we still had “sea creature” and other terms to use if we like, I’d say that this particular linquistic change was an improvement, which at least clears me of the implicit charge of stupidly upholding tradition for its own sake.
As to judging some usages and some changes as better than others, I confess freely to the charge. Is there some good and universal rule by which you decide what words to use (and when to find a piece of text unclear by reason of its word choice), and would you like to let us in on it? Is it purely scientific, or purely random, or something else?
There’s glory for you. By which I mean, of course, a statement of a case, take it for what it’s worth; I am not bound by Humpty Dumpty’s choices.
More to the point, if you want to say something that could well be merely metaphorical, and you would like to convey the fact that it is meant in what the fogies would call a “literal” sense, what do you do? Avoid the whole thing, I suppose; or perhaps re-cast the statement in a way that avoids possibility of an ambiguity. Once more, not what I’d call a gain over having one well-understood word that does the job. It appears we differ on this point.
Interesting distinction, though you could say all words, terms or concepts possess an equal volume of meaning, the only distinction is in focus – whether broad like ‘sea creature’ or narrow like ‘blue-ringed octopus’. You can’t lose one without gaining the other and visa versa.
Which makes you normal I guess. But words like ‘correct’ and ‘abuse’ imply a far more objective judgement than can fairly be applied to something as slippery as language.
No. One rule to decide what’s the right word for any situation would be a ludicrous thing. How I decide if it’s unclear is if I can see potential ambiguities in it that aren’t clear from context, or just if I as a reader can’t pin what it means.
Er, “intertextuality”, I think it is. My literary theory is patchy. Basically meaning is the sum of usage. So I usually go from gut feelings and associations based on the contexts I’ve heard words and blocks of language used in. That is if I think about my choice of words at all, which like most people is very little, at least in speech. What’s your method?
I would use ‘actually’ or ‘really’ and let the context and intonation do most of the work. If the context didn’t look like it would work I might go for ‘physically’, ‘quite literally’, or, if I wanted to show off ‘in the most literal sense of the word’ or ‘and I’m not exaggerating here’. I suppose I might even use ‘literally’ if I wanted to avoid repeating myself, and I imagine it would work just as well as ‘actually’ if not better.
What would you do if you were using a normally extreme metaphor that has been overused in less extreme contexts, and wanted to convey the fact that it wasn’t a false alarm, the situation really did merit that kind of a metaphor?
Ah, good old Humpty Dumpty. There’s something weird about having a straw man who is actually an egg.
What you mean is not ‘correct’ but ’standard according to my particular tastes’.
Stopping at “standard” would have made you more “correct.”
http://www.slate.com/id/2129105/
“You could say all words contain the same volume of meaning,” but you would be chatting shit. One can quite easily measure info, as negative the log of the probability of the symbol’s occurance. That implies the more frequently a word is used, it must offer less information. And ‘implies’ is ‘for sure’, while ‘insinuates’ is ‘perhaps’.
There is an error in thinking people use ‘correct’ to refer to their own tastes. The question of whether communication is effective depends on the audience’s understanding, not the author’s. So, if everybody who communicates with me uses the word ‘literally’ in different, sweeping ways, I can have no idea what they mean by it, which is ineffective communication. That is not an issue of taste. If nobody reads one’s prose, it is bad prose, regardless of what the author thinks of it. So there.
That said, how can the speech be “very unique?” Can another be almost as unique, but not quite?
Insomnia sucks.
Sorry, my previous comment should have read:
Stopping at “standard” would have made you more “correct.”
—–
Anyway, yes, Some Guy, you’ve said it very well.
I think you missed Porlock Junior being a little tongue-in-cheek there, with his “very unique” and “pretty extreme” and “identical” and whatnot in a discussion about “meaning-losing” words. Just goes to show . . . something or other.
Could be. I admit using the word ‘taste’ was something of an exaggeration, but in the end, what counts as a ‘standard’ and whose you use is very subjective. ‘Colour’ or ‘color’? Is “I didn’t have lunch yet” wrong? That’s just British and American English. What about regional dialects which don’t have an official standard? Is “you was” or “I were” standard by your standards? “Innit” as a universal question tag? “Youse” as second-person plural?
I’m not entirely sure what you mean by this, but you seem to be defining ‘meaning’ purely in terms of precision. ‘Dog’ might not be as specific as ‘collie’ but I would say it has just as much, if not more meaning as it can include so many different things.
I don’t get where you’re coming from. More frequently used words end up infused with all kinds of meanings and associations, which makes them richer. ‘Thing’ might not give much information, but it can mean an awful lot. Besides, by your reasoning ‘the’ and ‘a’ have almost no meaning at all, whereas choice of one or the other can turn a sentence on its head.
True, but I’ve never heard of that happening in practice. If everyone was using ‘literally’ to mean whatever they wanted, from “I’m exaggerating here” to “ice cream sandwich”, that might be confusing. But what we actually have is two fairly similar meanings, one that is used by everybody and one that is only used by some. And you normally do have some idea what they mean by it, because no word exists in a vacuum. Try rewriting some sentences with ‘actually’ instead of ‘literally’ and you’ll find they don’t lose much.
And I never knew people were using ‘literally’ figuratively so far back.
Interesting discussion of gain or loss of meaning. What are we to make of “sunrise” and “sunset” which we in the West have known for at least four centuries mean precisely the opposite of what they appear to say? “Sunrise” refers to the setting of the earth, and “sunset” to earth’s rise. Neither word refers to any movement of the sun, nor could they do so, since the sun does not move on diurnal timescales in our modern cosmology. Yet we still use these words, so their semantics have changed diametrically. Can a theoretical linguist say what went on here?
The meanings aren’t similar; they are opposites. The specific problem with “literally” is that, unlike other words that have two opposite meanings (such as “cleave” or the verb “table”), you cannot consistently get its meaning from context. That’s because the word exists to provide context. Take away its ability to that and what you have is a meaningless filler word.
Yes, I can get someone’s meaning from context if she says “I literally laughed my head off.” She didn’t, though I may wish she had. But those intensified figurative statements, which don’t really need the intensifier anyway, are now the only place where the word’s meaning is clear. What if she says “I literally sat on the sofa all day.” What does she mean? “Literally”‘s former ability to provide context, and therefore its only truly useful purpose, has disappeared.
Given that using the term “literally” now impedes communication more than it aids it (since you have to ask “do you mean literally literally or figuratively literally?” or speakers have to clarify themselves preemptively, like Biden), I think it should probably be avoided altogether. If context is what’s important, let’s all speak in metaphor.
‘Literally’ might sometimes be used to intensify a metaphor, but it’s never used to specify one. Claiming the two meanings are ‘opposites’ is a gross oversimplification. Either that or a very flexible reading of ‘opposites’.
I’m not sure what you mean by ‘context’ here. I was referring to all the other words in the sentence and the other sentences and unspoken background information around that. I can’t see what ‘literally’ would add to that. Maybe we’re at cross purposes with the idea of ‘context’, but I think ‘clarification’ is the word you’re after.
I would disagree that they don’t need the intensifier. For a start, it’s not really a question of necessity, and for a finish, it makes it clearer that, although the speaker’s head is still in place, there has been no exaggeration of the level of hilarity. How would you propose conveying that meaning otherwise?
I don’t know. But that’s not because it’s unclear whether ‘literally’ means ‘not metaphorical’ or ‘metaphorical but not exaggerated’. It’s because it’s unclear whether it refers to sitting on the sofa, all day or both. Whichever it is, the speaker probably lay down, or got up off the sofa to go to the toilet or make a cup of tea on at least one occasion, and that the session didn’t last the full twenty-four hours. So in fact, there is almost no ambiguity, as an entirely literal reading of the sentence is all but impossible.
Really? The damage to the old sense of the word is hardly fatal, and the new sense is useful. If anything I’d say we have a net gain.
I’ve honestly never had to ask anyone that. And I’m not convinced that was what Biden was doing either. It struck me more as emphatic repetition than anything else. After all, it’s not as if anyone would read “changed the circumstances” as a metaphor anyway.
You’ll have to explain that one.
I genuinely can’t think of a sentence where it would be unclear which sense of ‘literally’ was being used. I’m sure you can. But the rule of thumb I would go for is whether a more ambiguous word like ‘actually’ can be substituted with the same intonation. So for example, “I actually laughed my head off” and “I actually sat on the sofa all day” are no more or less ambiguous if said with the same stress.