OK. I had hoped that the last quoted sentence – that there are occasions when a competent writer uses “literally” to introduce a brilliantly effective metaphor – would give us some common ground. I guess not.
So I think we’re left with this distinction:
You: “There’s no such thing as bad writing, as long as some kind of meaning can be extracted. If it succeeds in communicating, it’s all good.”
Me: “There are absolutely such things as good and bad writing, and rules of grammar and usage, while they may be flouted by skilled writers who write brilliantly, serve a valuable purpose in helping the rest of us write coherently.”
I found this an interesting discussion, thank you, though apparently nobody budged one iota from their firmly held beliefs.
I realize that you might find a nuance here somewhere to argue about. You should also realize that each and every one of the points you made in post #100 can easily be refuted, and I would be happy to do so if you doubt that, though here I’m trying for economy of expression in the hope of wrapping this up. And in that regard, what I will say is that people have great differences of opinion about language, about its rules and formalisms, and about the appropriate role of informed intervention in guiding its evolution. And that’s fine. We’re all entitled to hold reasonably informed opinions. Linguists often tend to side with descriptivists due to the essentially empirical nature of what they do, but not all of them are non-judgmental about the utility of prescriptive rules:
From Introducing Sociolinguistics, Rajend Mesthrie, Edinburgh University Press:
… sociolinguists cannot pretend that prescriptive ideas do not or should not exist. On the contrary, ideas about good and bad language are very influential in society. The British linguist, Deborah Cameron (1995b), coined the term “verbal hygiene” for the practice born of the urge to improve or clean up the language. Just as hygiene is necessary for good health, verbal hygiene is felt to be necessary for everyday language use. She points to the need to pay attention to the role of journalists, writers, editors and broadcasters in promoting an awareness of acceptable public forms of language.
Well, of course, given that you misparaphrased me.
“Successful communication” isn’t the end-all and be-all of language. There’s also aesthetic concerns. And if folks attacked the intensifier use of “literally” solely on aesthetic grounds, I wouldn’t argue with them. “Bad writing” is of course a thing–a thing we can argue about, since opinions can be debated, but definitely a thing.
But the very fact that it’s an opinion, not a statement of fact, appears to be why folks avoid attacking the intensifier “literally” on those grounds: they don’t want to state their opinion, they want to declare others WRONG. It’s “incorrect” usage, according to Little Nemo. Folks aren’t using it “properly” according to WOOKINPANUB. It is a “lamentable corruption of language” and “a thoughtless mistake,” according to you.
That’s the eyerolly stuff. Folks like Mijin, who just hate it, aren’t the problem. Hate away! But when you start making all these specious claims about its correctness, well, that’s when I got me a bone to pick.
I’m really not trying to prolong this argument (we can stop any time! :)) but you’ve set me off on another round of ruminations. My argument with this disputed use of “literally” is, at its core, admittedly a stylistic preference, even if I do feel quite strongly about it. I’m not saying anything different than your cite at the Macmillan Dictionary said when he simply (and more gently) demurred that “it may be better to avoid this kind of thing”. But if one is expressing a stylistic preference, surely it’s good form to provide a reasoned argument in support of it. Your allies Pinker, Pullum, and McWhorter do this all the time, and many of their arguments are speculative and controversial opinions.
Anyway, all I’m doing here is trying to rationally support a strong stylistic preference. “Lamentable corruption of language” is just an editorial comment, not the argument itself (perhaps you’d be happier if I’d said “it’s literally a corruption of language” to highlight the hyperbole? ;)). My actual argument is that the use of “literally” to intensify a metaphor is a device that is more at home in the realm of poetic and lyrical writing than in everyday speech; that it’s a tool that has to be wielded with care and skill, or else its counterintuitive meaning is useless, potentially confusing, and perhaps unintentionally comical. That good writers use it in what superficially appears to be a similar way is not a blanket justification for using it as an all-purpose intensifier, because one finds that when good writers do it, they are intentionally implying a very close similarity between the metaphor and the reality, as in the examples I gave earlier. A comically poor usage like “he literally hasn’t got a right foot” is just bad writing, period. (Sure, as you point out, “he has two left feet” is a common idiom; note that the expression is not “he literally has two left feet”, a variant that would be perplexing rather than enlightening.)
Some good points about prescriptivism in general have been made by none other than Noam Chomsky, probably the greatest living linguist and arguably the most influential ever, often considered the father of modern linguistics, and certainly the most cited in the literature. His theories include the ideas of a universal grammar common to all human languages, and the generative grammars through which we create coherent sentences. Chomsky nevertheless believes that “sensible prescriptivism” is culturally very important, that the US (and, I would add, much of the world) is experiencing a literacy crisis and that there is a troubling degree of functional illiteracy. Separately from that, he also believes that creative writing can be fostered, much of it through common sense, but that there is little or nothing that linguistics can contribute here.
Here’s a pertinent quote and a link for further reading:
Q: In College English in 1967, you wrote that “a concern for the literary standard language—prescriptivism in its more sensible manifestations—is as legitimate as an interest in colloquial speech.” Do you still believe that a sensible prescriptivism is preferable to linguistic permissiveness? If so, how would you define a sensible prescriptivism?
Chomsky: I think sensible prescriptivism ought to be part of any education. I would certainly think that students ought to know the standard literary language with all its conventions, its absurdities, its artificial conventions, and so on because that’s a real cultural system, and an important cultural system. They should certainly know it and be inside it and be able to use it freely. https://chomsky.info/1991____/
To be fair, Chomsky agrees with Pinker and most other linguists that many of the prescriptive conventions governing language use can be artificial and even absurd, in terms of violating our natural innate sense of language. But they are what they are, and conforming to them is culturally important. I’ve argued that they’re also important to communication, because poor sentence structure or some unexpected form or usage can throw our comprehension for a loop. I maintain that poor usage of “literally” can be in that category, the problem being not precisely its use in a figurative sense, but more accurately, that it’s problematic when it’s used in support of a bad metaphor. In those cases it’s at best useless and at worst confusing. What the intensification accomplishes is that it compounds the problem of the bad metaphor by effectively proclaiming, “the thing I’m trying to describe is so very much like this bad metaphor that it’s almost literally the same”. Which is why it’s not just useless, but often unintentionally comical, and unintended comedy has to be one of the most decisive indicators of bad writing. I would posit that the reason such writing causes so much annoyance is the double-barrelled effect of a bad metaphor intensified by a preposterously inappropriate, counterintuitive adverb.
With regard to prescriptive rules in general, as I’ve said before, I’ve often had to stop at the end of somebody’s poorly constructed sentence and read it a second time to understand it. This, too, is objectively bad writing.
I have no patience for arguments that try to cajole me with whoever you think are my allies.
Except: it’s an intensifier, so it’s not useless; there are still no real-world examples in which the word “literally” is confusing; and the comical value is entirely to mavens who pick a bone with this usage for no good reason.
I find your claims about the beauty of the authors’ usages very strained, an attempt to draw a distinction that’s not actually there. It’s an intensifier, not fugu liver.
What are you even talking about here? Of course the idiom isn’t “he literally has two left feet”. Idioms almost never contain intensifiers. I can see you’re perplexed, but it’s not literally’s fault.
Sure: if a meaning is rendered opaque through awkward construction, that’s bad writing. But “literally” isn’t a problem here: meaning is virtually never obscured by the word’s inclusion, except when a maven deliberate insists on misunderstanding its usage.