File under “Lite Bombastic, Tripping the”: Liteis not an abom- ination.
In 1975, the Miller Brewing Company was engaged in a battle that attracted almost as much attention as its less-filling!-tastes-great!
arguments waged in the legendary Miller Lite beer commercials (and likely involving even more shouting). Miller contended that other beers marketed as “Brand X Light” were violating Miller’s trademarked Lite,with its unique spelling, and instigated lawsuits against seven competitors.
Meantime, other rumblings were, um, brewing. Lite’s growing popularity provoked outrage not from the T-totalers but from the L-I-G-H-T-totalers. Fuming at this abominable intentional misspelling, the L-I-G-H-T-totalers seemed certain that our nation’s youth would be leaving the streets strewn not with empty beer cans but with ignored silent G-Hletter combinations. Of course, such alarm over modernized and seemingly illiterate respellings has been around for years, and a related target has been “misspelling”
nightas nite.
Of course, Miller was wrong. About the lawsuit, anyway. In 1977, a U.S. circuit court ruled: “because ‘light’ is a generic or common descriptive word when applied to beer, neither that word nor its phonetic equivalent may be appropriated as a trademark for beer.” And Miller was oddly right. About the spelling, that is. Light and nightare of course very old words, tracing back to Old English.
Yet, the silent G in each word is not native to its spelling; it was added around the 1300s. Early spellings of the adjective light,the opposite of heavy, include (in alphabetical and not chronological order) léoht, leht, leicht, leyt, lighte, lihht, liht, lihte, lit, lite, lixt, lycht,
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lyht, lyt, lyte, lyth. The orthographical cornucopia of night spelling variants is far more extensive. So, yes, liteis not a currently accepted spelling, but then again it is perhaps closer to the word’s original spelling than our currently accepted variant.
By the way, Miller Lite commercials claimed that the brew had “a third less calories,” which of course had the L-I-G-H-T-totalers responding, “You mean ‘a third fewer’calories,” as calories are count- able items and not amorphous amounts. In the land of word history, however, that would have smacked of redundancy. Though unrelated to light,the now obsolete word lite,tracing back to Old English, meant
“few.” Maybe that’s the Litethat Miller Brewing had in mind all along.
FIGURATIVE/LITERAL
File under “Figure 8 (ively)”: “Literally speaking” is not a figure of speech.
If I were to say in exasperation, “I was literally climbing the walls,”
the persnickitors might very well respond, “I was figuratively climbing the walls!” both to correct me and to express their own exasperation with dorks who confuse the concepts of “literally” and
“figuratively.” People regularly (and the persnickitors say incor- rectly) use the word literallyto express figuratism. If you figuratively climb the walls, you are agitated/frustrated/crazy. If you literally climb the walls, you are Spiderman.
But even literally climbing the walls can be figurative. Here’s my logic. If I say, “I was climbing the walls,” you understand that I mean it in the figurative sense. You don’t picture me with suction cups on my hands and feet, delusionally declaring myself to be Peter Parker while climbing the second of two stories of the J.D.
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Johnssen Business Miniplex and All-Night Dry Cleaners in Powhattan, Kansas (besides, no one proved that about me in court).
My statement declares the literal. You infer and therefore under- stand the figurative. This is what we call hyperbole.
Now, if I say, “I was literally climbing the walls,” I am still declaring (though more specifically) the literal. But suddenly you stop inferring and understanding the figurative, misled by the semantic use of the word literal and not considering its possible communicative use.
Perhaps I meant to intensify my exasperation with an adverb intensi- fying the climb. How, I ask, is “I was really really really climbing the walls” any different than “I was literally climbing the walls”?
Besides, how could anyone possibly interpret my saying “I was literally climbing the walls” as a confession that I was once again bringing out the suction cups (and consequently further payments to my lawyer)? Persnickitors understand what I mean (it is still, after all, hyperbole), yet they choose to concentrate on how I expressed the thought while ignoring what I expressed. This is somewhat akin to telling Dick Fosbury, who introduced the then- bizarre backward high jump to track and field, “Yeah, you leaped over that high-jump bar, but it doesn’t count ’cuz you flopped.”
Granted, I’m being argumentative. I myself am always careful to distinguish between the words figurativelyand literallyin writing and speaking. Yet, there are other things to consider about this “mistake.”
Consideration #1: The precedented flip-flopping of words expressing the figurative vs. the literal. A virtual cornucopia of words originally expressing reality now express figuratism. And you see the hyperbole in that previous sentence, don’t you? The phrase “virtual cornucopia” connotes exaggeration, yes? Especially since a cornucopia is a mythical object. But . . .
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The original “literal” meaning of virtualconnoted physical pres- ence or influence, kind of a cousin of the word visceral. That meaning goes back to the late 1300s, when our modern holographic-tinted phrase “virtual reality” might actually be under- stood, though would probably be considered redundant.
The meaning of virtual has kind of flip-flopped—literally and figuratively. In that context, also consider “veritable cornucopia.”
Consideration #2: The literal interpretation of the word literal.If we’re to be so persnickitorially literal in our use of literal,then let’s employ the rule of Xtreme Etymological Stasis, beyond and back- ward of what the speaker intends the word to mean, and back to what the word originally, actually, virtually, veritably meant in the first place. If you were literally “literally” climbing “the walls,” you would be clambering over ascenders and serifs and other thorny obstacled rungs on the ladder formed by the letters T, H, E, W, A, 2 L’s, and an S. You see, to be literal, in the literal sense, is to be involved with letters. The ABC type letters.
Now, another literal expression might be (suction cups not needed) “I was walking the walls—literally.” An early obsolete meaning of literallywas “alliterative.” Woo-woo! We walk the walls!
Literally, of course.