I am literally figurative

Commenting recently on the GOP presidential race, prominent political prognosticator Larry Sabato said that in Florida, “we have what is literally a Category 5 hurricane for the Republican nomination.”

Literally? Yikes, A. Barton Hinkle, a columnist for The Richmond Times-Dispatch, writes.

The last time a Cat-5 hurricane made landfall in the United States was seven years ago, when Katrina slammed into New Orleans. Tuesday’s primary was eventful, but nothing as bad as all that. The word Sabato wanted was “figuratively,” not literally. 

He is not alone. About the same time, a Denver TV station was reporting that a young man named Jordan Staucet “is pounding the pavement – literally – looking for a job.” So he was hammering the concrete with his fists? Not exactly. He was simply walking around handing out résumés. 

“Pounding the pavement” is an idiom, a figure of speech, and normally nobody would perform a figurative act literally. If you say someone does pound the pavement literally, then you are saying – well, you know.

To be fair, this persnickety criticism might not be, um, fair, Hinkle writes.

Jesse Sheidlower, a dictionary editor, let it be known a while back in Slate that we shouldn’t take such statements quite so literally. In “The Trouble With Literally,” he notes that using literally as an intensifier has quite a literary pedigree. F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote that Jay Gatsby “literally glowed,” and Louisa May Alcott wrote that “the land literally flowed with milk and honey.” They didn’t mean either of those statements literally. They meant Gatsby really, really glowed and the land was really, really plentiful. 

To Sheidlower, this is no big deal, since in the strictest sense, “literally” does not mean what we usually mean it to mean anyway. We have already wandered from the original purpose of “literally” whenever we use it in any sense other than “to copy a text word for word or letter for letter.” (The Latin root is litteralis, “of or relating to letters.”) So if you say you are literally sick to your stomach, and then vomit, you are still using the word “literally,” as it were, figuratively.

Well, Fitzgerald was a drunk, so there.