Re: OT: "literally"

[David Auerbach auerbach@xxxxxxxx]

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