Guardians of Hyperbole
Exaggeration isn’t the enemy. Overuse is.
I have been literally obsessing over the witty article Courtney Kirchoff posted earlier this week. In the article, Ms. Kirchoff literally lists the reasons we need to put an end to abusers of the word “literally.” We all know them. Some of us are them. And a few of us are literally ready to lash out at them. Troublingly though, the worst abusers aren’t the grammatical gangsters who are robbing the word of its meaning by misapplying it to their more figurative moments. It’s the people like me who are killing “literally” — with overuse.
Hyperbole is fun. And adding “literally” as a preface to descriptions that are clearly figurative is fun in the same way. It’s a kind of ironic exaggeration, and it brings a little more humor to moments that might not be obviously funny. For example: “My arms are literally falling off after trying to lift heavy things like Courney Kirchoff.” Of course my arms aren’t literally falling off. I’m not a zombie, and the rules of biomechanics suggest that my fingers would loosen their grip first anyway. Is “literally” necessary? Of course not. But is it confusing anyone? I really doubt it. Most people have enough practical experience with their own bodies to keep track of the figure despite the ironic hyperbole. The added beat in the sentence provokes some comic tension, but it doesn’t really create confusion.
I think the real problem with “literally” is that it’s overused. Actually, I think the real problem with language right now is that many of us are over-reliant on a decreasing number of “literally”-like words and devices. I’m conscious of the fact that I’ve slipped dangerously close to “Back in my day…” territory, and I promise to self-arrest soon. My point is: if we somehow manage to rid the world of the misusers of “literally,” we’ll still be stuck with the writers using it correctly. And our anecdotes and texts will be further impoverished by the loss of one more type of wordplay. And, actually, I’d, like, rather read a lot of hyperbolic uses of “literally” than some of the other lexical filler cluttering today’s verbal and written expressions. tbh.
The photo that heads Ms. Kirchoff’s article features big, frazzled letters reminding us that “WORDS MEAN THINGS,” and it is delicately captioned with the claim that “Words need defenders.” Words do mean things, but they don’t need defenders. As many readers have pointed out in notes on Ms. Kirchoff’s article, language morphs over time. Words come and change meanings and go. And grammar is fluid in ways that confuse and annoy. But when we try to defend the status quo of bygone grammatical eras, all we do is make the self-conscious communicators among us more self-conscious of their usage. That self-consciousness then translates into over-reliance on whatever safe, established patterns of speech and writing happen to linger after the hormones of high school and the hootenanny of college.
Words don’t need guardians, they need creative speakers and writers. And I, as a frequent listener and writer, would like as much originality and playfulness as I can get my ears and eyes on, literally.
