Author: The Mighty Reptile | Submitted: May 3 2004 at 11:55:56 PM Misuse Of The Word Literally The word literally
Recently, as I was rooting around in the bins of my local plastic surgery clinic I was unlucky enough to overhear part of a conversation held by two of the clinics non medical personnel obviously outside the building for some illegal and probably unsanitary purpose, for your edification I will transcribe the pertinent section of said conversation:
1: “…that’s fucked man, you must have been totally ‘off it’”
2: “Too right man I was literally shitting bricks”
It was as much as I could do to suppress some primal protestation of rage with another mouthful of fatty tissue. YOU DID NOT LITTERALLY SHIT BRICKS YOU ASSANINE GIMP! If you had you would not be standing in that nonchalant way discussing it with your pestilential co-conspirator. You would be on you back howling in scarcely definable agony or better yet undergoing some kind of groundbreaking rectal transplant.
It has come to my ear across the train compartments and drinking halls of this city far too often in recent times; the sound of some under intelligent and over vocative fool, caught in some heated monologue and desperate to impress upon his under enthused audience the gravity of his situation, the largeness of some otherwise innocuous object or the hardness of the “seeing to” he had meted out on some hapless female. What can he do? The medium of metaphor has let him down in the past, it never really gives the really tangible feeling he’s looking for and he certainly can’t tell the truth, as this would undermine the very purpose of telling the story. (This purpose more often than not being some rudimentary form of mating display, showing off his virility much in the same way as Baboons do when they flash their arses at one another.)
Then through the haze of Stella, latent venereal disease and a limited imagination glides the solution; a combination (or synthesis if you will) of both the literal and the metaphorical that will lend his anecdote both the towering breadth and scope of the metaphor while still allowing it to be interpreted (in some basic unconscious way) as the truth: Simply put the word literally in front of anything that is quite patently non-literal. It’s a ruse so blisteringly simple and so undeniably effective that it can pass without comment often in the most erudite of company.
Phrases such as “It was literally as big as a bus” or “He’s literally head over heals in love” proliferate our air space like tapeworm larvae in a diseased gut and while in many ways they are perfectly innocuous blending as they do with harmless phrases such as “It was practically as big as a bus” or “He’s obviously head over heals in love” however they are in fact yet another example of how so many people have no fucking conception of what actually makes up their world.
Let me tell you how I see human development progressing if we allow ourselves to be led astray by these erroneous “literalists”:
Languages are conventions and words when taken outside the terms of those conventions are literally meaningless. The words are subsistent to the system they serve (language) and that system exists to provide contact between individuals both through space (speech) and time (writing) but they also provide the basis for our assessment of the world around us; when words make claims that seem incongruous with those of the words that they are used with we can tell that those claims are spurious and discount them. If we start conventionalising meaningless associations then in the end we’re all going to end up trapped in our own isolated bubbles babbling meaningless gibberish and engaging in unproductive and self serving pastimes like collecting trainers and contemplating the relative merits of different types of house music. We will be incapable of telling the difference between what exists and what does not.
With these communicative conventions stripped away we will lose our sense of time and space, drifting through the undefined universe, the auto communicative delights of Big Brother beamed directly into our passive minds. Questions such as “Does Daz really clean whiter than white?” will become more and more difficult to answer until finally they reach the level of great imponderables, cults of Latter Day Timberlakians and Sanctified Aguillerians will spring up in response to peoples failing ability to tell the difference between the truth and what is presented as the truth.
Finally, seeing the level of cultural senility we have reached some enterprising demagogue will whip those who are dispossessed of the atavistic dream into some kind of socio-nationalistic movement with promises of “active B concentrate” and “the greatest show on earth”. His followers will rise up and overthrow the otherwise happy consumer class using the age old but still popular “beating your opponent round the head until they die” system of restructuring. We consumers, being incapable of differentiating anything from anything will probably interpret this armed revolt as a particularly intense Pantene advert.
On the upside due to the sheer energetic nature of having you head beaten in with sticks and their afore mentioned inability to differentiate, most of the consumers will die in a state of psychosexual ecstasy.
The moral of this story?
IF YOU MISUSE THE WORD LITTERALLY YOU WILL BE SCULL-FUCKED TO DEATH BY NAZIS! |
