Re: OT: "literally"

["mhchoate" mhyerchoate@xxxxxxxx]

Hi all ...
This is a lightweight business book, about leadership. Not a "scholarly"
book. Context is everything.
The tone of the section containing this sentence is light-hearted, anecdotal
... I think the author may even be poking a bit of fun at the use of the
word "paradigm" -- and I think "compute" is used in the sense of "that
doesn't compute" ... to mean understand and find valid ....
This book is better written than most I get -- and WAY better organized
(making indexing easier). The author has made me like him personally --
that doesn't usually happen ...

Back to work!
Marge
----- Original Message -----
From: "Harry Binswanger" 
To: 
Sent: Friday, June 08, 2007 4:00 PM
Subject: Re: OT: "literally"
Marge,
I think this "literally" is correct: it means he's denying that it was
maybe 30 seconds or a couple of minutes, but just literally two (or maybe
three) seconds. You can argue with the placement of the "literally"--where
it is makes it sound like it modifies "took." Also it is missing an "of."
As a whole, the sentence is very badly written. What is it to compute a
paradigm? What is it to express a paradigm?
I just read this sentence in the book I'm indexing:
"It literally took him a couple seconds to compute this new paradigm that
Frank was expressing."
Before this thread, I wouldn't have read this sentence twice. (Maybe not
even once.) I'm trying to figure out what, if anything, "literally" adds
to this sentence. Hmmm...

Marge