"The American press has literally emasculated President Nixon"--Interesting Random Thoughts
This made me chuckle, so I had to share it here.
I was reading The Linguistics Wars: Chomsky, Lakoff and the Battle Over Deep Structure by Randy Allen Harris: Second Edition, and, as I mentioned in this past Weekly Reading Vlog, last week I came upon a couple pages detailing a spat that Steven Pinker and George Lakoff had when Steven Pinker published a take-down review of George Lakoff's book.
Curiosity got the better of me, and I looked up the review. Which you can still read online.
In that review, there was this little gem that had me chuckling with amusement:
Also, most metaphors are not processed as metaphors as all. They may have been alive in the minds of the original coiners, who needed some sound to express a new concept (such as "attack" for aggressive criticism). But subsequent speakers may have kicked the ladder away and memorized the idiom by rote. That is why we hear so many dead metaphors such as "coming to a head" (which most people would avoid if they knew that it alludes to the buildup of pus in a pimple), mixed metaphors ("once you open a can of worms, they always come home to roost"), Goldwynisms ("a verbal agreement isn't worth the paper it's written on"), and figurative uses of "literally," as in Baruch Korff's defense of Nixon during his Watergate ordeal: "The American press has literally emasculated the president."
Ah man! That's got to be the best misuse of "literally" ever!
I Googled it just to double check it was real. The exact quote only turns up links back to Pinker's review, but if you change "the president" to "president Nixon" then you get several more sites.
...although most of those sites turn out to be just interviews with Steven Pinker or reviews of his book. So apparently, at least so far as the Internet is concerned, the quote mainly traces back to Steven Pinker's writing and talks, but... I'd like to believe it's real just the same.
When I originally read the above quote, I pictured Baruch Korff as Nixon's defense attorney. But Wikipedia (link here) shows that Baruch Korff was just an activist supporting Nixon, not an official member of Nixon's staff. And so I think he made this remark in his capacity as a private citizen.
Pity. I originally pictured Korff was making this argument on Nixon's behalf in the court room or on "Meet the Press" or something. I imagined that Baruch Korff made this statement, there was some quiet snickering from the galley, and Nixon goes beet red. Or something like that scene.
It looks like Pinker first used this quote in his book Stuff of Thought, which, as I wrote here, I started reading years ago, but never actually finished. If I ever find a good copy out here in Vietnam, though, I'll give it another try.
No comments:
Post a Comment