literally a darwin award
The Darwin Awards (Seed)
The final award comes a bit late for the late Philip Quinn of Kent, Washington. On November 30th, 2004, for some reason, the 24-year-old Quinn placed a lava lamp on his stove. Maybe he was disappointed with its meager bubbling and hoped that a slow boil would improve the effect.Quinn’s plan literally backfired when the lava lamp exploded, sending a large shard of glass shrapnel through his heart. Makes one wonder if 70s peaceniks are concerned that their hippie-chic tchotchke has become an instrument of death and destruction.
According to dictionary.com, a backfire is “an explosion of prematurely ignited fuel or of unburned exhaust gases in an internal-combustion engine”. Figuratively, “to backfire” means “to produce an unexpected, undesired result”.
Even though we’re not talking about an internal-combustion engine, I’ll mark this as a correct use of “literally”.
January 9th, 2006 at 3:44 pm
since a plan can’t literally backfire, i would say this is incorrect.
-gar
January 10th, 2006 at 11:18 am
@gar, yeah I think you got me there. Good point.
January 27th, 2006 at 6:44 pm
Maybe “literally blew up in his face” would have been closer to acceptable usage, or even “literally broke his heart.”
February 9th, 2006 at 10:19 pm
What if the writer played coy and said, “Quinn’s plan backfired, as it were, when the lava lamp exploded…”?
February 10th, 2006 at 12:31 pm
Hello, “literally” activists. As the writer of that piece, I’d like to offer a few comments in my defense by jamming a bit on my personal literally theory:
I believe the word “literally” is used to distinguish between a figurative use of an expression and the literal use, i.e., taking the components of the expression to be what actually happened, not as purely idiomatic. If no distinction needed to be made, then the word “literally” could be and should be left out entirely (”I literally sat down in my chair!”). Therefore, in order to use the word “literally,” the phrase should closely mimic the original idiom, in both structure and usage.
The usage part is why I wouldn’t say “literally broke his heart,” because the figurative, emotional expression isn’t especially applicable here. To Ken R: had the lamp hit his face, I would prefer your “literally blew up in his face;” however, the author of the post only deemed my use unacceptable because of the word “plan,” not because of “backfire.” I thank him for OKing “literally backfire” more generally for this situation: A google of define:backfire yields a host of literal definitions, applying to torches, spray guns and normal guns, so I’d say any explosion in the opposite direction of where it was intended, towards the person who applied what was necessary for an explosion, is probably a loosely good literal use of “backfire.” Sloppy, perhaps, but not figurative.
So, in any case, I used the “plan backfired” phrasing, to mimic the structure of the figurative expression and then used “literally” to highlight the literal backfiring nature of the accident. Nitpicking “the plan backfired” versus “the implementation of the plan caused a backfire” may be officially correct, but I think the gist of the usage was fine.
Although perhaps I’m a poor commenter for this blog, as I’m not a “literally” snob at all. I don’t think people misuse “literally” by substituting it for “figuratively,” I just think they’re using it hyperbolically and thus slowly sapping it of its power.