Your mind is literally blown

[Tank]

We all recoil when someone uses the word "literally" when they mean "figuratively"... But what if they were just using "literally" figuratively... LITERALLY?

Don't look at me like that.

I've got a linguist on my side...

http://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~nunberg/CLliterally.pdf

To judge from the number of letters and emails that I receive as chair of the American Heritage Dictionary's usage panel, no profession takes such a proprietary interest in English usage as lawyers do (software engineers come in a distant second). And the dereliction that most often annoys my legal correspondents is the use of literally to intensify the force of an idiom, as in "She literally bit my head off" or "I'm literally starving."

Lawyers aren't alone in this, of course; critics have been condemning the usage for a long time. In 1909, Ambrose Bierce commented, "It is bad enough to exaggerate, but to affirm the truth of the exaggeration is intolerable." And two decades later, H. W. Fowler excoriated the hyperbolic use of literally with a rare show of indignation: "We have come to such a pass with this word that where the truth would require us to acknowledge our exaggeration with, 'not literally, of course, but in a manner of speaking,' we do not hesitate to insert the very word that we ought to be at pains to repudiate; such false coin makes honest traffic in words impossible."

False coin it may be, but the counterfeiters are in good company. Dickens used literally loosely, and so did Thackeray (who wrote in 1847, "I literally blazed with wit"). And you can find the construction in the works of James Joyce, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Vladimir Nabokov. With such illustrious precedents to draw on, who can blame the football announcer who says "They literally hammered the quarterback into the ground"?

...

In the end, this is an eternal story of original sin and redemption. It's natural enough for us to use literally in a loose way to "affirm the truth of an exaggeration," as Bierce put it. If "I'm starving" is hyperbole, then "I'm literally starving" is simply more so. And when you think about it, the critics' objection to that use of literally is rather odd — it amounts to saying that literally is the only word in the language that can never be used in a figurative way. Even so, most of us come around once we become aware of the ridicule that we can come in for when we use literally loosely — "You don't mean you were literally floating on air?"

That's the moment when most of us get our first inkling of what literal is really supposed to mean. It can be a difficult notion to get a handle on — as linguists have been at pains to point out, our speech is shot through with dead metaphors, and the great body of them are so run-of-the-mill that we don't pay them any mind. (I count seven in the previous two sentences alone — eight if you include literal itself, which doesn't really have anything to do with letters.) Metaphor is so basic to our thought that it's impossible to tell where literality leaves off, nor is there usually any practical reason for trying to do so.

If anything, can we at least all agree that pissing off lawyers is good sport?

[Gil Gunderson]

I take full responsibility for this thread's existence.

[Slaky]

"Dude, it was so funny I literally shit my pants!"

"Well, what did you do?"

"What do you mean, dude? I was laughing..."

"I mean, what did you do with your shitty pants?"

"No, dude, I didn't REALLY shit my pants, I LITERALLY shit my pants!"

[thehawk]

WWPD?

[Wheezer]

To judge from the number of letters and emails that I receive as chair of the American Heritage Dictionary's usage panel, no profession takes such a proprietary interest in English usage as lawyers do

That's a pretty odd assertion.  I had always assumed that a standard part of the legal curriculum was some sort of practicum dedicated to faulty parallelism, thorougoing misuse of relative pronouns, and whimsical punctuation, based on seven years' proofreading at SASM et Flom.

[PenFoe]

To judge from the number of letters and emails that I receive as chair of the American Heritage Dictionary's usage panel, no profession takes such a proprietary interest in English usage as lawyers do

That's a pretty odd assertion.  I had always assumed that a standard part of the legal curriculum was some sort of practicum dedicated to faulty parallelism, thorougoing misuse of relative pronouns, and whimsical punctuation, based on seven years' proofreading at SASM et Flom.

As usual, I have no idea what your post says.
However, I'm pretty sure you said you spent 7 years proofreading and then used the word "thorougoing"

But I'm not sure, your post could be about Mexican food for all I know.

[Wheezer]

To judge from the number of letters and emails that I receive as chair of the American Heritage Dictionary's usage panel, no profession takes such a proprietary interest in English usage as lawyers do

That's a pretty odd assertion.  I had always assumed that a standard part of the legal curriculum was some sort of practicum dedicated to faulty parallelism, thorougoing misuse of relative pronouns, and whimsical punctuation, based on seven years' proofreading at SASM et Flom.

As usual, I have no idea what your post says.
However, I'm pretty sure you said you spent 7 years proofreading and then used the word "thorougoing"

So I did.  I blame burnout.  Either that, or all the cat hair in this keyboard.

[Slaky]

To judge from the number of letters and emails that I receive as chair of the American Heritage Dictionary's usage panel, no profession takes such a proprietary interest in English usage as lawyers do

That's a pretty odd assertion.  I had always assumed that a standard part of the legal curriculum was some sort of practicum dedicated to faulty parallelism, thorougoing misuse of relative pronouns, and whimsical punctuation, based on seven years' proofreading at SASM et Flom.

As usual, I have no idea what your post says.
However, I'm pretty sure you said you spent 7 years proofreading and then used the word "thorougoing"

But I'm not sure, your post could be about Mexican food for all I know.

He spent 7 years proofreading. As in, those days are gone. Besides he makes up half the words in his posts so how would anyone know? Thorouging might be a word on Planet Wheezer.

[Jon]

To judge from the number of letters and emails that I receive as chair of the American Heritage Dictionary's usage panel, no profession takes such a proprietary interest in English usage as lawyers do

That's a pretty odd assertion.  I had always assumed that a standard part of the legal curriculum was some sort of practicum dedicated to faulty parallelism, thorougoing misuse of relative pronouns, and whimsical punctuation, based on seven years' proofreading at SASM et Flom.

As usual, I have no idea what your post says.
However, I'm pretty sure you said you spent 7 years proofreading and then used the word "thorougoing"

But I'm not sure, your post could be about Mexican food for all I know.

He spent 7 years proofreading. As in, those days are gone. Besides he makes up half the words in his posts so how would anyone know? Thorouging might be a word on Planet Wheezer.

I believe "Thorouging" is the rawness associated with frequent visits to Redtube.

[TDubbs]

To judge from the number of letters and emails that I receive as chair of the American Heritage Dictionary's usage panel, no profession takes such a proprietary interest in English usage as lawyers do

That's a pretty odd assertion.  I had always assumed that a standard part of the legal curriculum was some sort of practicum dedicated to faulty parallelism, thorougoing misuse of relative pronouns, and whimsical punctuation, based on seven years' proofreading at SASM et Flom.

As usual, I have no idea what your post says.
However, I'm pretty sure you said you spent 7 years proofreading and then used the word "thorougoing"

But I'm not sure, your post could be about Mexican food for all I know.

He spent 7 years proofreading. As in, those days are gone. Besides he makes up half the words in his posts so how would anyone know? Thorouging might be a word on Planet Wheezer.

I believe "Thorouging" is the rawness associated with frequent visits to Redtube.

[Wheezer]

Que Nao Bustamante?

[Jon]

Que Nao Bustamante?

[Oleg]

To judge from the number of letters and emails that I receive as chair of the American Heritage Dictionary's usage panel, no profession takes such a proprietary interest in English usage as lawyers do

That's a pretty odd assertion.  I had always assumed that a standard part of the legal curriculum was some sort of practicum dedicated to faulty parallelism, thorougoing misuse of relative pronouns, and whimsical punctuation, based on seven years' proofreading at SASM et Flom.

As usual, I have no idea what your post says.
However, I'm pretty sure you said you spent 7 years proofreading and then used the word "thorougoing"

But I'm not sure, your post could be about Mexican food for all I know.

He spent 7 years proofreading. As in, those days are gone. Besides he makes up half the words in his posts so how would anyone know? Thorouging might be a word on Planet Wheezer.

I wouldn't mind visiting that planet.  Is there atmosphere?  Plant-life?

[Tank]

To judge from the number of letters and emails that I receive as chair of the American Heritage Dictionary's usage panel, no profession takes such a proprietary interest in English usage as lawyers do

That's a pretty odd assertion.  I had always assumed that a standard part of the legal curriculum was some sort of practicum dedicated to faulty parallelism, thorougoing misuse of relative pronouns, and whimsical punctuation, based on seven years' proofreading at SASM et Flom.

As usual, I have no idea what your post says.
However, I'm pretty sure you said you spent 7 years proofreading and then used the word "thorougoing"

But I'm not sure, your post could be about Mexican food for all I know.

He spent 7 years proofreading. As in, those days are gone. Besides he makes up half the words in his posts so how would anyone know? Thorouging might be a word on Planet Wheezer.

I wouldn't mind visiting that planet.  Is there atmosphere?  Plant-life?

Fungi, mostly.

[PenFoe]

To judge from the number of letters and emails that I receive as chair of the American Heritage Dictionary's usage panel, no profession takes such a proprietary interest in English usage as lawyers do

That's a pretty odd assertion.  I had always assumed that a standard part of the legal curriculum was some sort of practicum dedicated to faulty parallelism, thorougoing misuse of relative pronouns, and whimsical punctuation, based on seven years' proofreading at SASM et Flom.

As usual, I have no idea what your post says.
However, I'm pretty sure you said you spent 7 years proofreading and then used the word "thorougoing"

But I'm not sure, your post could be about Mexican food for all I know.

He spent 7 years proofreading. As in, those days are gone. Besides he makes up half the words in his posts so how would anyone know? Thorouging might be a word on Planet Wheezer.

I wouldn't mind visiting that planet.  Is there atmosphere?  Plant-life?

Fungi, mostly.

Jesus, why don't you just buy him a plane ticket?