Literally!

 

“So, what did you do today, Anna?”  I asked my eldest daughter.  It is Christmas break, and I imagined that she had slept in till all hours.

“The big thing I did today was to take a walk,” she told me.  “I literally walked a mile or two and then I was working on the puzzle you all gave me for Christmas.  It’s actually a really hard puzzle.  See, it is a puzzle that looks like a copy of an old manuscript of Fur Elise and all of the pieces literally look the same.  Like, they are shaped differently, but they just have bits of notes on them and kind of a yellow-tan look to them and you can’t tell which part of the puzzle they go in.”

“Interesting,” I said.  “So, you literally woke up, walked, and worked on a puzzle today?”

“Yes,” she said.  “Although it sounds weird when you say it like that.”

Listening to my daughter tell a story these days is an interesting experience.  If she was unable to use the words “literally” and “actually,” I have a feeling that whatever tale she is weaving would grind to a halt.

I suppose most of us have pet words that we use regularly.  These are verbal tics that come out as we speak.  We probably are not even aware of them, while the people around us are very familiar with our use of them.

The funny thing is that Anna doesn’t really mean “literally” when she uses the word “literally.”  She is simply using the word as an intensifier – a way of saying that something was really hard, or really great, or really beautiful.

I suppose that the world expects everything we experience to be dialed up to eleven.  This is the way that influencers in our midst talk, and I suppose that if we want people to listen to us, we need to be equally intense in our expressions of pain, pleasure, and anxiety.

Jesus doesn’t seem to have felt this way at all.  In the Sermon on the Mount, He told His followers, “Just say a simple, ‘Yes, I will,’ or ‘No, I won’t.’ Anything beyond this is from the evil one.” (Matthew 5:38) The point was that He wanted His followers to simply state the truth, not needing to embellish it with extra words or swearing that something was true.

I don’t think Anna is wrong for using lots of intensifying words in telling her stories.  I imagine most teenagers do this.  I do think that people will believe us, not because we use the right words, but because we are known to tell the truth and live our lives with honesty and integrity.

Adding more words actually changes nothing and could literally detract from the story as the people reading it are literally turned off by our overuse of a word, the meaning of which it seems like we literally don’t understand.  Or something like that.