Re: OT: "literally"

["mhchoate" mhyerchoate@xxxxxxxx]

Yep to all your comments.
Oh, I love reading this stuff. Uh, I love reading this list's OT messages
... not necessarily all the books I index ...
Marge
----- Original Message -----
From: "David Auerbach" 
To: 
Sent: Friday, June 08, 2007 2:48 PM
Subject: Re: OT: "literally"
That sentence has so many things wrong with it that it is hard to know
where to begin.
The "paradigm" used to mean something, but it has been worn out until it
is virtually empty of meaning now. It seems, from the sentence, that a
paradigm is something that can be both expressed and computed. Now, I
can thing of a few such things. For example, functions. I can express a
function ("the square root of __") and I can compute it. But even that
won't do for the sentence since the sense in which I can compute a
function is this: I can, given an value compute the value of the function
at that given value. It is that second sense of compute that can take an
amount of time, not the first. Perhaps context would help that sentence.
 If I had to guess, the author meant (if the author meant anything) by
"literally" "only". But that's a Humpty Dumpty sense of "meant".

On Jun 8, 2007, at 2:02 PM, mhchoate wrote:
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
----- Original Message ----- From: "Patricia M. Godfrey"

To: 
Sent: Friday, June 08, 2007 11:10 AM
Subject: Re: OT: "literally"
Harry Binswanger wrote:
Are you literally driven up the walls, as I am, by the misuse of
"literally" as in the start of this sentence?
Yes, and we're not the first. H. W. Fowler, and his last good reviser,
Sir Ernest Gowers (whose own Complete Plain Words is also
informative and entertaining) pilloried this with such examples as
"If the Home Rule Bill is passed, [the Irish Unionists] will be
literally thrown to the wolves" (I thought wolves were extinct in the
British Isles?)
"She literally lifted her horse over the last jump." (She being
Atalanta or some such.)
"The Prime Minister sat through the debate literally glued to the
Treasury Bench" (tsk, tsk. MPs acting like little boys.)
It occurs, in a variant form, in David Pogue's column:

"On trips, I literally used to pack two laptops."
But no, it may be trite there, but he did, literally, pack two laptops.
If he had written, say, "I used to literally break my back lugging two
laptops," THAT would be the usage we all condemn.

--
Patricia M. Godfrey
PriscaMG@xxxxxxxx