In a frank interview with the Guardian at the weekend, Taylor Swift revealed just how traumatic the summer of 2016 was for her. “I was literally about to break,” she confided. As fans lapped up the detail about her spat with Kanye and why she felt unable to endorse a presidential candidate, in a more specialised corner of the internet, all hell broke loose.
Well, maybe that’s an exaggeration – the eminent linguist and cognitive scientist Steven Pinker did call her “The newest member of A.W.F.U.L. (Americans Who Figuratively Use ‘Literally’)”, implying that he wasn’t keen on her choice of words, and around 3,000 people backed him up. The point is, we have to assume Taylor wasn’t in fact “about to break”, unless there’s something she’s not telling us about her yoga regime.
The newest member of A.W.F.U.L. (Americans Who Figuratively Use "Literally"): Taylor Swift: ‘I was literally about to break’ https://t.co/lfPlStvTbg
— Steven Pinker (@sapinker) August 24, 2019
So here we are again, with the semantic pedants pitted against the language-evolutionists. “Literally” should only ever mean “In a literal, exact, or actual sense; not figuratively, allegorically”, according to one group. This matches its origin in the Latin word littera, meaning “letter” (think “the letter of the law”).
Another set of people sees it being used far more loosely, and is fine with that. Dr Jennifer Gunter responded to Pinker, tweeting: “Language evolves. Literally. Young women drive that change. Get on board, deal, or step aside.” (Incidentally, it’s odd that Pinker seems to be siding with people he has gently mocked in the past as “language mavens”. Maybe he was just joking – but, to mix a metaphor, he should know that in stirring the “literally” pot, he’s playing with fire).
So who’s right? And what it is about “literally” that gets people so riled up?
Understanding the latter can help us with the former. Literally is a word in the midst of a change, as Michael Israel has argued. It sits a little way down a path that many other words have trodden. As such, it’s at an inbetween stage, where its meaning and function are up for grabs – and people tend to have a difficult time with ambiguity.
To see what I mean, consider the following sentence: “Djokovic is really giving Federer a thrashing today”. Can you imagine anyone complaining that this is wrong, on the basis that in a tennis match no actual thrashing takes place? They might say it’s over the top, but I’d be surprised if anyone claimed “really” was being misused.
But, in their origins, “really” and “literally” aren’t a million miles apart. Back in the 15th century, “really” wasn’t used for emphasis, like in the tennis example. It meant “in reality”, or “in fact”, ultimately deriving from the Latin res, meaning “thing”. Explaining the religious doctrine of the eucharist in 1450, one author wrote “within this bread all the sovereign good is put … bodily and really” – and meant that the bread actually had the presence of Christ in it. Given time, the word came to mean something more like “indeed”: “You have really told a very pretty story” (1751); and later still, it started to be used simply for emphasis: “A really pretty maiden” (1824).
This is a fairly common process in language evolution, whereby words relating to the facts of a situation tend to become more subjective. They get bleached of their original meaning, and instead of saying something concrete about the matter at hand, say something about the speaker’s feelings instead. They are used to convince, to emphasise or to intensify a comment. This happened with “really” but it also happened with “very” (which used to mean “true”) and “actually” (which used to mean “in action, rather than thought”) – to the point that we have got completely used to those changes. Now it’s happening to “literally”.
But literally hasn’t quite settled into its new role. When Swift says “I was literally at breaking point”, it’s fairly clear she’s adding that word to beef her description up, to tell us quite how strongly she feels about what she went through. There are still many people for whom the concrete meaning sounds more natural, though – and it jars. Some of them may also hold to the false idea that a word’s origin tells you what it should mean – but that’s easily disproved (for example, “silly” has its origin in a word that meant “happy”).
All of which is a roundabout way of saying it’s fine to use literally, figuratively. It makes no sense to argue otherwise, unless you want to junk “really” too. In any case we’ll all soon be doing it. As for Pinker’s criticism? Just shake it off, Tay.
• David Shariatmadari is the author of Don’t Believe A Word: The Surprising Truth About Language
