Re: OT: "literally"

["mhchoate" mhyerchoate@xxxxxxxx]

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