With all the awful problems of the world, I’ve resisted all year the impulse to object literally and literately to the misuse of the word “literally.” A sentence in Sunday’s New York Times by three-time Pulitzer Prize winner Thomas Friedman, though, was literally the last straw.
Friedman wrote about Lebanese “deep anger for the way Hezbollah joined with the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad to crush the democratic uprising there. It is literally like the Wicked Witch from the Wizard of Oz is dead and now everyone is thanking Dorothy (i.e., Israel).”
Aha, a metaphor: Friedman is equating anger with a fictional witch and Dorothy with Israel. Metaphors are often golden, but “literally like”? Friends, Romans, and corny men, “literal” means that if you stand up someone six feet tall at a wall and flatten his hair to put a pencil mark on a growth chart behind him, the mark will be at six feet. “Literally like” is an illogical monstrosity.
This is only worth writing about because erratic uses literally surround us. A headline proclaims, “Taylor Swift: I was literally about to break.” On the same day the staid Times misused the word, a headline in the metaphorically-named Rolling Stone proclaims, “Conservatives Test Whether the Supreme Court Will Do Literally Anything They Want.” Nine justices standing on their heads, faces hidden by falling robes?
I am literally typing this. I do not literally have steam blowing out of my ears.
My favorite is when people tell you: “I was literally scared to death.” You would think the account of their resurrection would be no less interesting, but somehow the story always just ends with the I-was-scared part.