Wednesday, May 03, 2006

Verbicide

This article is way more interesting than my tort law casebook: "Verbicide: The Perilously Leaning Tower of Babble."*

It's from 1983, but speaks to something Stephen Colbert has expanded upon and dubbed "truthiness," which is the quality of preferring concepts or facts one wishes to be true, rather than concepts or facts known to be true.

"I suspect that we in this country are participating in a disturbed mental state, wherein our identity as Americans is undergoing massive overhaul. We are reaching the deadend of one definition of an American and are groping our way into another one. Nothing should be left to the imagination. That takes too long. Reality must be handed over immediately. No gratification is marketable unless it's guaranteed to be as quick as instant coffee. Hence, all those literally sentences. They serve our need to appear observant and objective. Above all, they serve our need to appear real.

"The abusers of literally are not describing an event nearly so much as they are asserting their sincerity."



*Richard Pindell, The English Journal, Vol. 72, No. 6 (Oct., 1983), pp. 48-52. Full text available on JStor (subscription only, I think).

1 Comments:

Blogger Shimmy said...

Who literally kills more life on earth: Rumsfeld, or the avian flu?

9:46 AM  

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