of the abuse of words (okay, maybe not literally)

Today in The Rhetorical Tradition, my students and I are going to learn just how similar John Locke is to David Cross. In one short section of his "Essay on Human Understanding," Locke rails against people who abuse language, specifically those who "apply the common received names of any language to ideas, to which the common use of that language does not apply to them." Gah. That reads kind of garbly, esp. for Locke, the King of Clarity.

Maybe a contemporary comparison would help, and for this, I turn to David Cross on the widespread misuse of the word literally. We'll leave aside--just for the moment--Cross's vulgarity, with which Erasmus might take issue. If you can stomach foul language, though, give it a listen--it's a classic.

Comments

[Omri Ceren]

Funny. But woefully incorrect:

http://www.slate.com/id/2129105/

Still - a particularly well done venting of language rage. But I'm actually a little concerned for his health. All that anger must be taking some kind of toll on his heart, no? Perhaps:

http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/004156.html

wouldn't be out of the question.

[Lance]

David Cross is literally the shit.

[dhawhee]

ha! Thanks for the language anger mgmt link, Omri. I love that site.

[Omri Ceren]

Yeah, it's a fantastic site - they do a really, really good job. Easily one of the best academic blogs on the web. It's just the right combination of absurdly smart people who are really good at their discipline and total lack of sympathy for people who are bad at their discipline but front otherwise... Their rants on grammar books (especially The Elements of Style) are literally hours of entertainment. Literally.

[freedomfan]

I'm with Cross on the word abuse. Sheidlower's piece on Slate is fine, but I don't see it as an especially compelling defense of the misuse of 'literally'. The argument isn't that words can never change meaning, just that it's silly to have a word come to mean both one meaning and the opposite meaning. That is Bizarro World language.

To argue that this sort of word misuse is correct because there is a long history of it falls short because it's little different from saying that it's okay to say 2+2=5 because some recognizable person made the same mistake in 1870. That's just evidence that people making mistakes isn't a novelty of our time. Yes, it was wrong then, and it's still wrong.