Ah, the trials, tribulations and travails of the grammar geek. Here are a couple of quotes from an upcoming episode of Live at the Rehearsal Hall, featuring Matt Dusk:
“…and he’s not afraid to step literally where giants have walked.”“…I was mentioning earlier, I said that you were not afraid to literally walk where giants have stepped, and quite literally that’s true, because you recorded an album at the fabled Studio A at Capitol Music in Los Angeles, and you also recorded at Abbey Road. Now, we know who recorded at Abbey Road, and Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald, Frank Sinatra, recorded at Studio A at Capitol.”
Uh-huh. So there you have it. The famous recording artists of the ’30s, ’40s, ’50s and ’60s were all apparently between fifteen and twenty feet tall. STOP SAYING “LITERALLY,” YOU TWIT!!!
Hopefully people will be starting taking there words ‘n grammer seriously, since its really annoying for you and I.
I just don’t get this condemnation of “literally” as a figurative intensifier. Many good writers have used it, including Thackeray, Dickens, Nabokov, Joyce, and Fitzgerald.
All we’re doing is using words figuratively. We all use language figuratively. Why are we not allowed to use this specific word figuratively?
http://www.slate.com/id/2129105/ “The trouble with usage criticism of the sort leveled at literally is that it’s typically uneven: Parallel uses are frequent and usually pass unnoticed. For every peruse there’s a scan (see my essays on these terms here and here); for every hopefully there’s a clearly; and for every literally there’s a really: Or did you expect people to complain when really is used to emphasize things that are not “real”? When Meg, in Little Women, moaned that “It’s been such a dismal day I’m really dying for some amusement,” she wasn’t the one dying.”