A colleague commenting on yesterday's post on how people use literally as a hyperbolic intensifier referred to "McIntyrean permissiveness."
For a moment it felt like being back in the 1950s. Permissiveness! Why Johnny Can't Read! Monthly views with alarm in the Reader's Digest! The Enemy Within! Heavy petting! It all comes back.
Another five minutes and we'd be on to Boys No Longer Learn Latin Because We Stopped Beating Them.*
Let's be clear about this much: If you imagine that I am a permissive editor, talk to some of the reporters whose work has passed through my hands over the past thirty-six years. The word you may hear then is McIntyranny.
It is perfectly reasonable to avoid the hyperbolic literally in much writing; it's a colloquial use more common in speech. (I don't use it myself.) But it is nonsense to claim that the people speaking that way are destroying the English language. That sense has been in the language since the eighteenth century, and English is still here. Adapting the adverb to use as an intensifier is no odder than using really or truly in the same way, as some commenters have pointed out.
Neither do I see permissiveness in abandoning a whole set of rules of usage that have been demonstrated to be bogus. I regret the amount of time spent over the past three decades and more pointlessly changing over to more than or changing since to because. I also regret time spent over much of the past twenty-one years requiring the students in my editing class to conform to ill-founded journalistic conventions.
Once you learn that you have been mistaken, it's OK to stop making mistakes.
If I were editing for an academic or technical publication, I would labor under more restraints about what is permissible. But I am editing for the broadest general audience, and knowing how people actually use the language makes it possible for me to edit effectively for the audience. Bryan Garner is a prescriptivist, but he makes it plain in the introduction to Garner's Modern American Usage that he relies in part on online corpora as he revises his Language-Change Index to reflect actual usage. Editors, as we have discovered in recent conferences of the American Copy Editors Society, have a lot to learn from the work of linguists and lexicographers. We are allowed to take a view of language that sees beyond the Associated Press Stylebook's idiotic split-verb rule.
It is liberating to shake off pointless prescriptions and focus on things that actually matter. Permission granted.
*That was Dr. Johnson's view: "There is now less flogging in our great schools than formerly, but then less is learned there; so that what the boys get at one end they lose at the other." And even George Orwell said, " I doubt whether classical education ever has been or can be successfully carried on without corporal punishment." Given how traditional Latin pedagogy operated, he was probably right.