Number 103
In the December 13, 2004 issue of The Weekly Standard, Stephen F. Hayes gives lots of examples of the misuse of the word "literally" in "Literally Exasperated." It's been used so much that dictionaries now give it as a synonym to "virtually," and define it as an intensifier (like "very"), but that's just because they've given up. So now when someone says something is literally true, it's not at all. That's what you get with descriptive rather than proscriptive grammar. People say the opposite of what they mean. Literally.
Naomi Judd provoked Hayes to examine this word because she uses it so much and so wrongly in her new book, Naomi's Breakthrough Guide: 20 Choices to Transform Your Life, in which she promises to discuss her ideas at the "neuroscientist level." As a literal neuroscientist, she writes: "We literally become whatever we think about all day" and "I literally take you by the hand in this book."
Similarly, Jamie Lee Curtis, promoting her new book on TV, said: "How many college students do we hear in their freshman year literally explode? They explode with drugs and alcohol, they explode with sex, they explode with eating, they explode with not being able to get work done on time. . . .These people are exploding."
Literally?! Eww, gross.
Going back to the word origin, it's easy to remember that it's based on the Latin for "letter." Thus we have the "letter of the law" vs. the "spirit of the law." You can't always refer to a word's origin to find its current meaning, but you also can't keep reinventing the language every day, or else we won't know what people mean. What do you say when you really do mean "literally" if it is thought to mean the opposite?
This joyous time of year literally begs one to gripe, so forthwith I present my traditional list of Christmas gripes.
But first, thanks to Fred for "Portly's complaint," inspired no doubt by the plethora of Christmas cookies, candy, etc. that have been forced on us (by ourselves).
The inflated Christmas monsters are back, those 8-foot tall lawn ornaments that collapse limply on the ground when their fans are turned off. I'm sure the kids enjoy them so I'll have to get used to them, but someone ~ perhaps you? ~ could make a fortune by inventing a way to deflate them so that they look better. The fan could fit into a box that looks like a Christmas present, and suck the air out until they fit compactly into the box, until it's time to blow them up again.
Have you been bit by the PC madness that has turned the holiday into a "season"? Those who forget word history are doomed to . . . an eternity of shopping in a holiday season mall. Of course not everyone in the country is Christian, but it's Christmas that everyone gets off work for. Some stores instruct their employees to say "Happy holidays" to customers instead of "Merry Christmas," even though they have pre- and post-Christmas sales.
Some Jews have adopted the secular and fun Christian customs, such as trees. Kwanzaa, created in 1966, goes from December 26 to January 1, and though it incorporates African concepts, if it's based on "first fruit" or harvest celebrations, why doesn't it take place in the fall, when most American harvest festivals are held? What we need is a holiday in August.
Remember that Christmas means "Christ's Mass," it is not a generic or secular holiday, or holy day. Any holy day, whether Christmas or Hanukah, has a specific meaning. Words mean something. Shopping doesn't mean as much.
It seems like I remember Sammy Davis, Jr. doing a funny bit about how different ethnic groups get sick: white people catch a cold, black people get pneumonia, Jews get bronchitis. You had to hear him doing the accents to appreciate it. But who gets la grippe anymore? Besides the French. It's a term that was used occasionally in somebody's old days. I also have a vague memory of a humorous poem that went "Hey hey for the goodly la grippe," but can't locate it on the Web. The only current reference in English that comes up is "La Grippe of the Trial Lawyers: Guess who's to blame for the flu vaccine fiasco?" by William Tucker in the October 25, 2004, issue of The Weekly Standard.
Walter E. Williams once again rightly beats us over the head about declining standards in education in two recent columns ("Higher Education in Decline" and "Higher Education in Decline II"). How to explain, he asks, courses such as "Canine Cultural Studies" (U. of North Carolina, Chapel Hill)? Veterinarians can plausibly study canines, but does doggy culture (presumably dogs in human history) merit a credit course? How about "I Like Ike, But I Love Lucy" at Harvard? Or "History of Electronic Dance Music" at UCLA? The best you can say is that it's premature to study 1950s TV shows and syntho-pop.
Following the first column, Williams got mail from teachers and professors who had their own egregious examples to report, like these:
One person wrote that he knows an elementary school teacher and said, "She believed, until just this past summer, that the state of Alaska was an island because it is so often shown as an inset on many U.S. maps, appearing somewhat like an island."A professor said that while he was trying to help a student with a problem, he asked her, "What is 20,000 minus 600?" He went on to say, "She literally could not answer without the calculator." He rhetorically questioned, "Should a person receive a college degree that cannot answer that in their head?"
An English professor wrote, "One of the items that I assigned was a two-page essay that described a favorite vacation or holiday. One student turned in two pictures drawn with crayon depicting the beach. When I gave her a failing grade, she was indignant and said that she put a great deal of work into the pictures. When I told her that she did not do the assignment and that she was supposed to write an essay, she said, 'But I don't know what an essay is!'"
Let's not assume that these are exceptionally stupid students. But the elementary teacher ought not to have received a degree without having figured out on her own what a map inset is. Students ought not to use calculators in schools (as my younger son was told to do in junior high) before proving that they can do the math. A college student ought to have written an essay before arriving in college ~ or have run across one somewhere in reading. (I've had freshman students tell me they'd never had to write an essay before.) But if you don't read books, how would you encounter the word? If you don't have enough curiosity to read books, why go to college?
Students commonly complain about work they don't like that they'll never have to "use" English or algebra or whatever in "real life." But these examples demonstrate lack of thinking ability, lack of basic skills, and lack of curiosity, all of which are useful in real life.
One of my Venezuelan students tells me that her mom is having trouble getting a visa to visit the U.S. for Christmas. She's done it before, but now President Chavez is afraid she won't go back. Her mom has to produce the deed to her house to show she has ties to the country and will return. They say his political opponents can't get good jobs now, so why not let them out? This lady isn't even a political activist, as far as I know, but her son can't get a good job because he participated in a general strike when he worked for the big Venezuelan oil company. Maybe that's why mom can't get her visa. We have the opposite problem here. People are dying, and in some cases killing, to get in.
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