Things Noted Here and There

by Cliopatria

There's a remarkably good selection of BBC podcasts at History: In Our Time. Thanks to Manan Ahmed for the tip.

At AHA Today, Elizabeth Grant and Robert Townsend bring us up to date on the AHA's Gutenberg-e Project, which underwrites the publication of selected monographs. Here's the list of titles to date.

I think you'll find Thomas Bartlett,"Breaking Bread: Horowitz vs. Bérubé," CHE, 8 December, ah, amusing.

Nominations for the Cliopatria Awards are closed and judges have the month of December to deliberate over them. One of Cliopatria's readers, however, asks that the nominees be cited here. So, in comments at each of these categories, you'll find the nominees: Best Group Blog, Best Individual Blog, Best New Blog, Best Post, Best Series of Posts, and Best Writer. During December, you'll be able to access those categories and their lists in comments simply by clicking on The Cliopatria Awards link in our lefthand column.

Finally, I don't know if your experience has been like mine (probably not, since I am older that any three of you put together), but sometime while I was still grading undergraduate essays the spelling of the word"many" morphed into"alot." My computer automatically corrects it, even as I write it, but -- no matter how often I corrected it in student essays – the next batch of them would have a lot of"alot." Maybe I was fighting a change of language that was larger than my red pencil could handle. Slightly later in my career, I noticed that the word"novel" referred to all books. I rarely saw it as an adjective, but everything between two covers – including the textbook – was"a novel".

Patrick Fitzgerald, an Atlanta web designer, thinks that he has found the latest, widespread fatality in popular usage."Literally" no longer means"to the letter" or"word-for-word accurate," but is used interchangeably with"virtually," as in"The Giants literally put a bullet in the heads of the Eagles,""Our eyes were literally pinned to the TV in the aftermath of 9/11" or"Fearing it would make her sick, she literally jumped out of her skin." Fitzgerald tracks the abuse of"literally" at Literally, A Web Log. It's old news by now, but a staffer at the Harvard Crimson was recently fired for plagiarizing from a column in Slate and Fitzgerald's blog.

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Nathanael D. Robinson - 12/5/2006

That has more to do with age.

Virtual :

1398, "influencing by physical virtues or capabilities," from M.L. virtualis, from L. virtus "excellence, potency, efficacy," lit. "manliness, manhood" (see virtue). The meaning of "being something in essence or fact, though not in name" is first recorded 1654, probably via sense of "capable of producing a certain effect" (1432). Computer sense of "not physically existing but made to appear by software" is attested from 1959. Virtually (c.1430) originally meant "as far as essential qualities or facts are concerned;" sense of "in effect, as good as" is recorded from c.1600.

Literal:

1382, "taking words in their natural meaning" (originally in ref. to Scripture and opposed to mystical or allegorical), from O.Fr. literal, from L.L. lit(t)eralis "of or belonging to letters or writing," from L. lit(t)era "letter." Sense of "verbally exact" is attested from 1599. Literal-minded is attested from 1869. Literally is often used erroneously, even by writers like Dryden and Pope, to indicate "what follows must be taken in the strongest admissible sense" (1687), which is opposite to the word's real meaning.

Ralph E. Luker - 12/5/2006

Thanks, Sharon. I've fixed the link in the post now.

Sharon Howard - 12/5/2006

Those of us without CHE subscriptions can go here.

Ralph E. Luker - 12/5/2006

I started to say something clever about these issues not literally keeping me up at nights, but the time stamp on my post puts the lie to that! Still, I don't understand that there would have been a time when "virtual" meant "literal".

Nathanael D. Robinson - 12/5/2006

To put in another way: if literal and virtual already exchanged places, why worry about it happening again?

Nathanael D. Robinson - 12/5/2006

Is "literal" any better than "truthful", "factual", or "veritable"? By opposing literal and virtual, aren't you in fact creating such a need?

In essence, literal references textual properties, not the characteristics of an argument or fact. For something to be "literal truth", it must be in writing. My guess is that what appeared in writing carried more weight than other types of evidence, and "literal" eventually took on qualities of truth.

Yet "virtual", in its origin, had more to do with what was considered truthful and ideal. The fact that literal and virtual have come to oppose one another shows how the short-term abuse of language rectifies itself--some other quality steps in to restore the exact, non-metaphorical meaning of the word that has become metaphor.

Side-note: if virtual reality could be seen as "manly reality", what would "womanly reality" be?

Ralph E. Luker - 12/5/2006

I thought that I signaled some of that, at least, in what I wrote about "alot". It wouldn't surprise me to see it recognized eventually. One of the problems with a word like "literally" morphing, by use, into meaning something like its opposite is that we still need a word for what it has meant.

Nonpartisan - 12/5/2006

That's literally the first time I've ever heard that word used. And I read alot of novels.

Nathanael D. Robinson - 12/5/2006

Ralph,

The devolution of "literally" into a figurative expression may be nonsensical, but it is typical of how language evolves: expressions that have exact meanings that are applied metaphorically to other things in order to be more inventive.

Consider this:

How many "groundbreaking" histories have you really read?

Are new theories really "provocative"?

Is "virtual" manly (virtus)?

"Abuses" of language hardly phase me. Indeed, language is hardly literal (of letters), but something that evolves organically from the daily use of common people. The learned men (histors) who think otherwise are arrogant.