By R.L.G. | BERLIN
IT IS literally impossible to be literal.
I know what you’re thinking. Literal is the word we use when we mean exactly what we say, and metaphorical or figurative is what we say when we’re playing around. When we’re being figurative, we say “it was a million miles away”, meaning “I walked for hours.” When we’re being literal, a million miles away is somewhere between the moon and Mars.
Now Johnson is on the record as supporting the traditional distinction between literal and metaphorical. When Joe Biden, the vice-president of the United States, says that Republicans “ran the economy and the middle class literally into the ground”, or Lindsey Graham, an American senator, talks of “literally turning nuclear swords into ploughshares”, it grates on the ears. Even though great authors have been “misusing” literally for centuries (watch this short video), Johnson still prefers its “I really mean it” meaning.
But as it turns out, it is not so easy to distinguish between literal and metaphorical. To start with the easy one: metaphor is itself a metaphor. It comes from the Greek metaphora. Meta- means “with” or “after” in Greek, but as a prefix it means “change”. Fora means carrying or bearing. Metaphor translates as "transfer" in Latin. When we use a metaphor, we transfer a concrete meaning across a boundary between the physical and the fanciful. My love is not, strictly speaking, a red red rose, but you know what I mean when I say she is.
Fine. But what about literally? The word’s oldest meaning is “Of, relating to, or of the nature of a letter, or the letters, of the alphabet” (Oxford English Dictionary). It is only by extension that “by the letter” has come to mean “real things in the real world.” And that jump makes literally—are you sitting down?—a metaphor.
For example, the literal meaning of drift is not “to move as if driven or borne along by current” (OED again). The “literal” (by the letter) meaning is the letters d-r-i-f-t. It is only when one is metaphorical about the meaning of “literal” that “drift” can mean “to move downstream”. Only by further metaphorical extension can it mean to simply wander, as in drifting thoughts.
Guy Deutscher, a linguist at the University of Manchester, calls all language “a reef of dead metaphor”. Most of the time we do not realise that nearly every word that comes out of our mouths has made some kind of jump from older, concrete meanings to the ones we use today. This process is simple language change. Yesterday’s metaphors become so common that today we don’t process them as metaphors at all.
Primal man, in inventing language, would have only used concrete terms he could stub his toe on, like tree and rock. So tree is not a metaphor, and rock is not a metaphor. As far back as the OED can tell us, they (in their physical meanings) are not metaphorical extensions of some other word.
But if “tree” and “rock” aren’t metaphors, nearly everything else in our vocabulary seems to be. For example, you cannot use “independent” without metaphor, unless you mean “not hanging from”. You can’t use “transpire” unless you mean “to breathe through”. The first English meaning of a book was “a written document”. If we want to avoid all metaphorised language (If we want to be “literal”), we must constantly rush to a historical dictionary and frantically check that there is no concrete meaning historically antecedent to the one we hope to use. In every language, pretty much everything is metaphor—even good old “literally”, the battle-axe of those who think that words can always be pinned down precisely.
Where does it end? For some, it might seem a Möbius strip of meaninglessness, unsettling even, all this metaphor. (Others may see here the makings of a conversation that could have appeared in the film "Slacker", pictured above.) Perhaps the metaphorical roots of “literally" offer a lesson in humility. Those who wish to chide Mr Biden for his misuse of the word may fail to recognise that we are all navigating—occasionally inelegantly—a reef of dead metaphors.
But those who are still keen to chide Mr Biden can take heart. The body of educated English speakers has decided, by voice and by deed, that “literally” does mean something real in the real world. Namely, “not figuratively, allegorically”. Widespread educated usage is ultimately what determines its meaning. And perhaps that is concrete enough.
The protagonist of “Next to Normal” has bipolar disorder. The show is encouraging audiences to open up about their own well-being
Aesthetics and politics are powerfully entwined in the 50-year career of the South African artist
The recently rediscovered painting made headlines in 2017 when it fetched $450m at auction. Then it vanished again