It's Literally Metaphorical

It seems very innocent, perhaps, at first reading, this sentence that opens a brief paragraph in a recent edition of The Week about how Bob Hoskins got into acting: "Bob Hoskins fell into acting literally by accident."

Aha ! cries the reader, this should be fun. Did he stumble on the steps of a theatre and had to be helped in limping, only to find himself on stage in the middle of a piece by Chekhov ? The combination of the words 'fell', 'accident' and 'literally' seem to imply something of that kind.

But it turns out that he didn't literally fall, and the accident was not as dramatic as the term usually implies. The 'accident' was just a misunderstanding - he found himself taking part in an audition that he had not meant to attend - and got the part.

Here we are with yet another case of the misused 'literally': "He literally swept her off her feet"; "I was literally boiling with anger".

But wait: the very term 'accident' has a history. It was not coined to describe disasters - rail crashes or broken windows or fractured pelvises. It is based on the metaphorical* use of a Latin verb cado meaning (literally !) to fall. The word accident, as used in our language for centuries, meant not a literal, physical, damaging event, but a metaphorical 'befalling' - a chance encounter, an unforeseen contingency, a coincidence.

So Hoskins's entry into the acting profession was a fall and an accident only in this metaphorical sense of a happening, something (a misunderstanding at an audition, actually) that 'befell'. It was not a 'literal' accident at all, but a metaphorical one, whether in its original sense or its modern one.

"Shut up, you miserable old pedant!", readers may well exclaim; "What you say may well be true, but who cares ?"

"No need to get nasty about it", the pedant replies. "No offence is meant. Beneficent pedantry is not so much complaining as explaining.*

* You'd think these two words would have a similar derivation: but actually they don't. 'Complain' derives from Latin plangere = to bewail; while 'explain' derives from Latin planus = flat or level.

It's Literally Metaphorical