My dad wrote that the big plot twist in Diabolique made him literally jump out of his chair. Which reminded me of my pet peeve: people (unlike my dad) who say "literally" when they mean "figuratively."
I try not to bitch and moan about new usages for the most part. After all, language is ever-changing and all that. But this one really ticks me off, because it removes a word from the language without providing an alternative. If "literally" now means "figuratively," then what word means "literally"? I guess "actually" can fill in, but it just doesn't have the same conversational oomph.
I've heard someone say that a couple was "literally joined at the hip." Oh really? Literally joined at the hip? So I guess they're conjoined twins? No, I didn't say that, but I still wish I had.
It even happens in Quicksilver, the book I'm reading right now. The character Daniel Waterhouse, a seventeenth century "natural philosopher," notes that an angry pirate captain can be seen running back and forth "with smoke literally coming out of his head," which really stuck in my craw. I doubt that a scientist would misuse the word "literally" twenty years ago (I would hope not even today), much less three hundred years ago.
Unless of course "literally" meant "figuratively" at that time, shifted to mean "actually" in the intervening years, and is now shifting back. In which case I withdraw my objection to the new usage (and am really impressed with Stephenson's research skills).
Speaking Quicksilver, I'm enjoying it. I'm not bothered this time by the interludes of people sitting around talking and getting in the way of the action, because there doesn't seem to be any plot whatsoever. The book reads as Stephenson's excuse to spend about 900 pages exploring an interesting environment and point of view, without any concern for, you know, story. Which turns out to be liberating: the interludes don't seem like an intrusion anymore because that's the whole book. 17th century people sitting around talking about science and philosophy, conducting experiments and so forth. If anything, the occasional scenes of action are now intrusive.
Or maybe I simply find 17th century science more interesting than crypotography. Stephenson rambling his way through a book, essentially wanking about the latter bores me to tears, but the former is more engaging.
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He literally puked his guts out.
Schmidlap literally faked him out of his jock.
As the above coment suggests, sports commentary is rife with misused "literally." Sunday, I had occasion to say to , "They're literally tearing the other team apart, and you didn't call me down to watch?" My favorite from a student paper is, "I was literally stuck to my seat with excitement."
No, "literally" wasn't used to mean "figuratively" in the 17th cent. In fact, the OED confirms my intuition that it was most likely to mean having to do with letters, written instead of spoken, in exact words--as continued in today's "a literal translation." (When reading Latinate words in 17th cent. English, you can assume a meaning informed by the Latin. How unlike today!) You can see how this spread to mean "actual," which seems to have started in mid-16th cent. (with my Main Main, Sir Thomas B.); but the closest definition to what we're talking about has its earliest cite in the 1800s.
Hmmm. I'll still read Quicksilver, but now I'm on the alert to be annoyed as well as entertained and informed. But yes, 17th-century science rocks!
I see from my comment that your journal doesn't accept LJ tags. Have to keep that in mind.
Hm, so it sounds like even if the pirate captain's head had been on fire, the character still wouldn't have described the smoke as "literally" coming from his head. How would a 17th century scientist have used the word? "His statement was literally recorded in the Royal Society minutes"?
I think it's generally asking too much to expect the characters in historical books to speak exactly as people of that time would have really spoken. If nothing else it would make the book difficult going for anyone who wasn't already well versed in the time period. Still, I like to see as little modern slang as possible.
I think you'd probably enjoy Quicksilver, though I don't know if you'd find a lot of inaccuracies, not being expert enough in the subject to catch mistakes myself. I'm about a third of the way through it, most of which is taken up with the main character acting as an assistant to Isaac Newton, Robert Hooke and John Wilkins.
My journal doesn't accept Livejournal tags, but I wonder if there's a way for me to add tags so you could link to names? I had to turn off all HTML in comments because of the comment spam problem, but if you post a URL with http at the beginning, it is converted into a link.
Yeah, the Royal Society sentence is a good example of the prime 17th-century use.
You're right that any historical, like any fantasy story, is in essence totally translated anyway. Still, I love it when the author uses some words in an appropriately archaic way--the best example I can think of is James Blish's novel about Ruger Bacon, *Doctor Mirabilis*.
I will read *Quicksilver* & then report what I think about it. John Wilkins rules!
If you go back to page 167, you'll see that the pirate captain in question is Edward Teach, who ``Wears smoking punks twined about his head, like burning dreadlocks, and, at night, burning tapers in his thick black beard.''
So, yes, Teach had ``smoke literally coming out of his head''.
Oh, thanks for pointing that out Claire! I had totally missed that about the "burning dreadlocks." Then I must take back my sniffing about misuse of slang in Quicksilver.