NEEDHAM, Mass. It’s 6:58 a.m.and Dan Klosterman is running behind schedule this morning as he boards a train that departs for Boston an hour later than his usual commute. “Damn cleaning people, they always screw up my alarm clock,” he says to Tom Clister, a friend who remarks that he hasn’t seen him in a while.
Because the two want to catch up on family and mutual acquaintances, they don’t take seats in the “quiet car,” where cell phones are banned and conversations that rise above a whisper are likely to draw stares, corrections from a conductor and, in egregious cases, verbal scoldings from other passengers.
“How’re the kids?” Clister asks Klosterman, who shakes his head and says “Thanksgiving was so bad, I literally exploded at them over the way they were looking at their cell phones under the table the whole meal.”
The two continue to chat but Klosterman is interrupted by a tap on the shoulder from Maeve Clonigan, a bookish-looking woman with an ill-fitting stocking cap on her head. “Excuse me,” she says.
“Yes?” Klosterman replies.
“So then this guy says that he ‘literally’ couldn’t wrap his mind around a problem–DUH!”
“You didn’t literally explode, otherwise you wouldn’t be here today. So you can’t say that in here, this is the Literally Car.”
“The what?” he asks, incredulous.
“You can’t ride in this car if you’re going to misuse the word ‘literally.’ The word means ‘factually true,’ it’s not just something you say to add emphasis to a figure of speech,” she says, politely but smugly.
Klosterman looks at Clister, who looks back at him. “She’s right, Dan,” he says. “We should go to another car if you’re going to do that.”
“I’ll be late. A woman said she was literally swept off her feet, they’re taking her to St. Metaphor’s Hospital.”
Klosterman starts to laugh, thinking he’s being “punked,” but when Clister gets up he follows him to the next car, while mouthing an abashed “Sorry” at the woman who stopped his crime in progress.
“That’s all right,” she says as she sits down again. “Just don’t let it happen again,” she adds with a steely glare over the cover of “Love’s Tender Eyedrops,” the “bodice ripper” novel she’s reading.
The misuse of the word “literally” as either a verbal intensifier or to signal its exact opposite–“figuratively”–is on the rise in America, triggering a backlash comparable to those that resulted in bans on smoking and cell phone use in enclosed spaces. “It sets my teeth on edge,” says Norman Calustra, a reference librarian at Blair Junior College here. “Of course, my teeth are on an edge to begin with, that being the edge that’s in my gums, so it’s literally true, but you know what I mean.”
“Okay, so I meant figuratively!”
Those who say language purists overreact to what they call a minor error in usage fear a “witch hunt” much like that which ended in the hanging of many innocent women and the crushing of an innocent man in Salem, Massachusetts, 325 years ago. “Of all the things to complain about,” says Elinor Olmstead of nearby Wellesley as she watches Klosterman go, “at a time when we literally have a madman in the White House.”
Clonigan, the little old lady who serves as the unpaid “Conscience of the Literally Car,” gets up to correct Olmstead but, just as she’s about to lower the boom on the offender, she hesitates. “As much as I’d like to ring her chimes,” she says, “I guess she’s entitled to her opinion.”