literalism
English
[edit]Etymology
[edit]Noun
[edit]literalism (usually uncountable, plural literalisms)
- Literal interpretation or understanding; adherence to the exact letter or precise significance, as in interpreting or translating.
- 1985, Robert Burchfield, The English Language, Oxford: Oxford University Press, page 73:
- Elsewhere, the liturgiologists were said to have "disembowelled the language of the Book of Common Prayer and the Bible" and produced in its place "the bland literalisms of Series 3 and the ASB[.]"
- 2015 January 6, Rachel Held Evans, “What Newsweek gets wrong about evangelicals”, in CNN[1]:
- Furthermore, what would otherwise be good points about the sort of selective literalism that renders homosexuality an unpardonable sin but shrugs off Sarah Palin’s biblically forbidden pearl earrings are lost in Eichenwald’s assumption that evangelicals make these decisions “with less care than they exercise in selecting side orders for lunch.”
- (art) The style of art portraying a subject as literally and accurately as possible.
- 2015, Søren Kierkegaard, Bruce H. Kirmmse, K. Brian Söderquist, Kierkegaard's Journals and Notebooks, Volume 2: Journals EE-KK, →ISBN:
- The two main forms of literalism are ergism and orthodoxy.
Related terms
[edit]Translations
[edit]literal interpretation or understanding; adherence to the exact letter or precise significance, as in interpreting or translating
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See also
[edit]- letter of the law
- metaphrase (translation theory)
- textualism
- to the letter
Further reading
[edit]- “literalism”, in Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, Springfield, Mass.: G. & C. Merriam, 1913, →OCLC.
- William Dwight Whitney, Benjamin E[li] Smith, editors (1911), “literalism”, in The Century Dictionary […], New York, N.Y.: The Century Co., →OCLC.
- “literalism”, in OneLook Dictionary Search.