Literally latent, but maybe not – 06/28/2023 – Sérgio Rodrigues

Better to err on the side of being obvious than on being silent: words are the smallest units of autonomous meaning in writing. Therefore, no scribe will be able to go very far if he does not cultivate with them, almost always through reading, at least a reasonable intimacy.

This means — not only, but first and foremost — knowing what they mean in dictionary status. In my case, there is no greater enemy of the good will I have for reading a text than discovering that its author uses, for example, “literal” for what is figurative and “latent” in the sense of “patent”.

Yes, I’m one of those. Although it is a phrase commonly used in informal contexts, especially in speech, I believe that “I’m literally fried” will never gain peaceful circulation in cultured language.

What is the point of guaranteeing the literality of what has none? There is, of course, the exception of the very serious cases of those who fried themselves by falling into industrial frying pans, but these are very rare.

Strictly speaking, “The trip left me literally dead tired” is a statement that could only be made by a dead author like Brás Cubas — or, who knows, received as a message from the beyond in spiritist centers.

A similar problem has a sentence like “So-and-so called me in tears, his pain with the separation is latent”. No, it’s not. The so-and-so’s pain was perhaps latent—that is, not visible, present but not manifest—before the crying. After him it is patent, that is, evident, it is in the face.

Some scholars argue that usage, even if misguided at first, will eventually normalize all of this—if it hasn’t already. In English, the use of “literally” when it comes to a figurative sense, as a simple mark of emphasis, has already won the approval of certain dictionaries.

Usage is really powerful. There is no lack in the history of languages ​​of examples of productive mistakes, misunderstandings that created new meanings. The word “forest” came to us from the old French “forest” and got an L at customs because people thought it had to do with “flower”. It didn’t have it, but it did.

However, the famous card that “language is alive” – ​​no doubt of great authority in conversations about words – does not seem to me to be the end of the game in this case. Yes, the language is alive. Like every organism, it can get sick.

It’s one thing to recognize that, in the continuous flux of street talk, every language is bound to change face all the time, with words gradually gaining subtleties that may end up making them entirely different from what they once were. And truth.

However, when the confusion falls on pairs of antonyms as perfect as literal-figurative and latent-patent, believing that ignorance will be productive seems to me to be overly optimistic.

The only logical consequence of one of two opposite terms coming to mean the same as its opposite is the destruction of both, their dilution in the jelly of what makes no sense.

The literal-figurative and latent-patent pairs are like chiaroscuro, happy-sad, hot-cold, undead, high-low, etc. Imagine if those words were interchangeable.

When the first term is defined in opposition to the second and vice versa, merging them is entropy, loss of language functionality, which becomes capable of saying less than it did. In a word, stupidity.

Could it be that one day all this will be considered correct? He can. I hope I’m literally dead by then.

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