Literally Metaphorical

Pedants complain that the word “literally” is more often misused than used correctly. “This post will literally blow your mind! Your brain will literally explode!” “Literally?” they exclaim. “Then I had better stop reading.”

But the pedants are not pedantic enough. Like any word, “literally” can be used figuratively, where this is not an abuse of language or one of those gradual shifts in sense that upsets prescriptive linguists—as when “disinterest” comes to mean “lack of interest,” not detached impartiality—but the exercise of a power always already held within the literal meaning of the word. To object that the figurative use of “literal” is oxymoronic, since “literal” means the opposite of “figurative,” is like arguing that the word “figurative” cannot be used literally, which of course it can.

This is figuratively—not literally—the argument of Andrea Long Chu’s critical review of Maggie Nelson’s book, On Freedom, reprinted in Chu’s collection, Authority. Nelson protests “the langua…