“Literally” comes from littera, the letter. To speak literally is to speak by the letter, whatever else we think we mean.
When we say “literally,” we usually mean “in fact”, “actually’, in actuality. The word gives us away. We have made the written word the measure of what is real.
Oral cultures knew things differently. A word was an event, spoken by someone, to someone, in a particular moment, non-fungible. It carried a voice, a face, a history.
The written word loses all of that. It sits on the page, stripped of tone, and waits for anyone to read it anywhere. It’s disembodied genius is also its weakness.
Literacy is a great gift. Literal-mindedness is what happens when the gift takes over the giver.
The literal-minded person asks what the words say. The wise person asks what the speaker meant.
Jesus spoke in parables, and nobody asked for the footnotes. Then the words were trapped, and literal-mindedness resumed its tyrannical rule.
After the Reformation, scripture was set loose on the page and the page became the final authority. Sola scriptura is a literate creed. Reading was trusted over listening, and the text over the community that carried it. We built house of printed cards on top of that.
Some scholars speak of the Gutenberg Parenthesis, the five centuries when print dominated how we thought. We are now slowly leaving it, and we can see its shape for the first time.
A fact is a sentence stripped of its occasion. Useful, and thin.
Metaphor is not decoration on knowledge. It is one of the ways we know. The metaphors we live by… We understand time through space, argument through conflict, life through journeys. The opposite of literal-mindedness is embodiment, enactivity.
Nuance lives in what the text leaves out: the pause, the irony, the raised eyebrow. A culture that trusts only the page loses the ability to hear them.
Context is not a footnote to meaning. It is where meaning happens.
As we know, a joke explained literally has died. So has a poem, a promise, a prophecy.
To read well is to listen through the letters.
The letter kills, the spirit gives life, after all; though both are important, the order matters.
Who’s the master, who the emissary?