LITERALLY

Tue, 06 May 2014 15:58:22 +0000

When I was in fifth grade, we had a student teacher in English. I’ll call her Mrs. N. I guess we were doing a lesson on literal versus figurative speech at some point that year and Mrs. N taught it. On the test at the end of the unit, there was a question to the effect of “What does the sentence ‘It’s raining cats and dogs?’ mean literally?” Now, I could tell that she really wanted to know what it meant figuratively, but that’s not what she asked, so I answered the question with “Cats and dogs are falling from the sky.” After she’d graded them she returned them and I saw that she marked my answer wrong, with a comment that “the question was confusing.” I went up to her and pled my case - everybody else in the class answered the question she’d meant to ask, but I answered the question she actually asked. Figuratively, that sentence means “it’s raining very hard.” Therefore, the literal meaning is just what I wrote, and my answer shouldn’t have been marked wrong. I appealed to the real teacher and she told Mrs. N that I was correct. I bring this up because the meaning word “literally” appears to have been eroded in recent years to the point where “literally” is no longer the literal definition of literal. I was reminded of this today when I read this story about Lara Logan:

English on Evan Hoffman

LITERALLY