It's literally a metaphor!

First off language rant. What is it with NZ TV presenters and their appalling use of language? I can see that unscripted, improvised speech is not always going to be perfect but when it comes to smug, pre-recorded voice-overs you expect a bit better. Surely a bit of flair with language, or at the very least technical accuracy, would not to be too much to ask for.

Case in point. The Big Stuff. Now I haven't really watched anything more than the beginning or final 5 minutes of this show but the gist of it seems to be sorting out the junk that people have in their homes and trying to make them be tidy. The hosts appear to be very pleased with themselves and of the belief that their victims, I mean the lucky recipents of the help, aren't merely messy, but that this is symptomatic of larger deep-seated relationship or personal issues. If you have too much junk in your house you must have trust issues or insecurities. A scene with people crying in a garage confessing some fear or inner self-loathing is usually cut to at some point.

But what really bugged me was the all too common oxymoron of using literally as in intensifier in a metaphor.

"Their house is now literally buried under a mountain of toys, books and furniture."

This voiceover was over the top of an exterior shot of said house with no mountain on top of it. In fact there were no toys or books covering even an inch of the roof, no sofas hanging off the guttering. The house looked decidedly unburied. Literally.

Figuratively, I can understand what she was trying to say. The house was so cluttered that it was difficult to live in. Buried is commonly used as a metaphor for hidden beneath; mountain is a common hyperbole for 'lots of'. The use of the two together is a standard cliche. Buried under a mountain of homework/laundry/bad reality TV etc.

I guess what really jabs its jagged fingernail at me is that the annoying incorrect insertion of 'literally' into a cliched metaphor is somehow meant to add intensity to the expression. It really is a bad and messy house. See, I used a metaphor *and literally* to convey just how bad it is.

This is really just laziness. If you want to convey intensity in figurative language, be creative. Metaphors or similes are most powerful when they create a vivid or lasting image in one's mind. They also have a rich ability to be strongly emotive based on the feeling associated with the image you use for comparison.

Consider:
"She literally ate like a pig." This insertion of literally into a fairly cliched simile is not only technically inaccurate (unless the person in question had a pig's mouth, snout and was eating slops from a trough), it is also boring and vague about which particular pig-like quality it is describing.

"She ate with the ravenous hunger of a pack of starved wolves who had unexpectedly stumbled upon an all-you-can-eat sheep smorgasboard." This would convey that the person was greedy and ate a large quantity of food in a short amount of time.

"She snorted up her food like a toothless camel sucking on its own cud." This would convey a sense that the eater was particularly noisy.

NZ used to have a history of using colourful and colloquial imagery. But recently, if TV can be used as a gauge of language we seem to have fallen into the depressed era of the cliche and the incomplete simile.

I actually have mixed feelings towards the incomplete similes. Partly I think it is a cute kiwi expression and in some contexts 'sweet as', 'beached as' etc can convey more than the completed similes might be able to. However, I do also worry that it could be symptomatic that youngsters are now lacking enough language resources to be able to think of an appropriate object of comparison to allow them to complete the simile. I guess that is also my main issue with too much swearing. People can become too reliant on using expletives to mean anything and everything, and they fail to allow many other words to enter their speech.

I was going to finish my rant with praise for The Lost Room, an excellent and compelling TV show, and the rather charming Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang but Matt bet me to it.

Ah well, here are some photos of Dominic instead. Sit back, relax and enjoy the following series of photos in which Dominic considers a piece of bread and then eats it. He eats like a baby. Literally.