OVERHEARD: A news anchor leading into a story about elementary students watching the Inauguration of Barack Obama: "The kids literally watched history unfold". I kept watching for some kind of a rolled up quilt with photos of the ceremonies to be opened for the children...
PLUS: Have you wondered just what Treasury Secretary Nominee Timothy F. Geithner means when he says his failure to pay certain taxes were "unintentional mistakes". Uh, as opposed to what? If they were intentional, wouldn't that be just plain fraud? And certainly the folks at Turbo-Tax are having a good news/bad news moment. Geithner used that product to do his taxes, which gets their product name lots of exposure, but since he made a huge mistake, was it the program's fault????
[*Literally Watch is a regular feature on this blog. I may be the last defender of the original meaning of that word. Folks like the anchor above mean to say "figuratively".]
We might need to acknowledge that the term "literally" has taken on a predominately figurative sense as an intensifier rather than a descriptor.
ReplyDelete"The greatest cause for verbicide is the fact that most people are obviously far more anxious to express their approval and disapproval of things than to describe them. Hence the tendency of words to become less descriptive and more evaluative; then to become evaluative, while still retaining some hint of the sort of goodness or badness implied; and to end up by being purely evaluative - useless synonyms for good or bad.. - C. S. Lewis. "Studies in Words" (1960)