File under “Figure 8 (ively)”: “Literally speaking” is not a figure of speech.
If I were to say in exasperation, “I was literally climbing the walls,” the persnickitors might very well respond, “I was figuratively climbing the walls!” both to correct me and to express their own exasperation with dorks who confuse the concepts of “literally” and “figuratively.” People regularly (and the persnickitors say incorrectly) use the word literally to express figuratism. If you figuratively climb the walls, you are agitated/frustrated/crazy. If you literally climb the walls, you are Spiderman.
But even literally climbing the walls can be figurative. Here’s my logic. If I say, “I was climbing the walls,” you understand that I mean it in the figurative sense. You don’t picture me with suction cups on my hands and feet, delusionally declaring myself to be Peter Parker while climbing the second of two stories of the J.D.
Bill Brohaugh
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Johnssen Business Miniplex and All-Night Dry Cleaners in Powhattan, Kansas (besides, no one proved that about me in court). My statement declares the literal. You infer and therefore understand the figurative. This is what we call hyperbole.
Now, if I say, “I was literally climbing the walls,” I am still declaring (though more specifically) the literal. But suddenly you stop inferring and understanding the figurative, misled by the semantic use of the word literal and not considering its possible communicative use. Perhaps I meant to intensify my exasperation with an adverb intensifying the climb. How, I ask, is “I was really really really climbing the walls” any different than “I was literally climbing the walls”?
Besides, how could anyone possibly interpret my saying “I was literally climbing the walls” as a confession that I was once again bringing out the suction cups (and consequently further payments to my lawyer)? Persnickitors understand what I mean (it is still, after all, hyperbole), yet they choose to concentrate on how I expressed the thought while ignoring what I expressed. This is somewhat akin to telling Dick Fosbury, who introduced the then- bizarre backward high jump to track and field, “Yeah, you leaped over that high-jump bar, but it doesn’t count ’cuz you flopped.”
Granted, I’m being argumentative. I myself am always careful to distinguish between the words figuratively and literally in writing and speaking. Yet, there are other things to consider about this “mistake.”
Consideration #1: The precedented flip-flopping of words expressing the figurative vs. the literal. A virtual cornucopia of words originally expressing reality now express figuratism. And you see the hyperbole in that previous sentence, don’t you? The phrase “virtual cornucopia” connotes exaggeration, yes? Especially since a cornucopia is a mythical object. But. . .
The original “literal” meaning of virtual connoted physical presence or influence, kind of a cousin of the word visceral. That meaning goes back to the late 1300s, when our modern holographic-tinted phrase “virtual reality” might actually be understood, though would probably be considered redundant.
The meaning of virtual has kind of flip-flopped—literally and figuratively. In that context, also consider “veritable cornucopia.”
Consideration #2: The literal interpretation of the word literal. If we’re to be so persnickitorially literal in our use of literal, then let’s employ the rule of Xtreme Etymological Stasis, beyond and backward of what the speaker intends the word to mean, and back to what the word originally, actually, virtually, veritably meant in the first place. If you were literally “literally” climbing “the walls,” you would be clambering over ascenders and serifs and other thorny obstacled rungs on the ladder formed by the letters T, H, E, W, A, 2 L’s, and an S. You see, to be literal, in the literal sense, is to be involved with letters. The ABC type letters.
Now, another literal expression might be (suction cups not needed) “I was walking the walls—literally.” An early obsolete meaning of literally was “alliterative.” Woo-woo! We walk the walls! Literally, of course.