Re: OT: "literally"

[Harry Binswanger hb@xxxxxxxx]

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


----- 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


Harry Binswanger
hb@xxxxxxxx