Literally

and can't literally be used in place of virtually (which is not literal, obv.) when it relates to effect?

why can't monsters get along with other monsters?

Nice.

can't you use 'literally' ummm not literally?

But why use it to mean completely the opposite of what it means? Why add a word to a metaphor that means 'this is not a metaphor'? 'Invariably' is annoying like this - people keep using it to mean 'often' instead of 'absolutely every time, without variation'.

"i literally shat my pants"

umm... are you sure?

http://www.slate.com/id/2129105/

I remember a physics gcse class many years ago where my teacher told us that if we didn't do X in the exam, we'd literally be throwing marks down the drain.

There was a guy in the class called Mark and the idea of throwing him (and others like him obv.) down a drain was rather appealing.

was that deliberate?

TS: literally vs. it's academic

I mean umm, No. If only I were that clever.

FUFUFUFUFUFUFUFUFU!!!!

Aw, ken, jhoshea is just being effusive.

If you doubt this to be true, just check out my personal website:
http://www.adorasvitak.com/Main.html

"Heat stroke can literally fry your brain like a boiled egg"

"The Whig Party literally fell apart during the 1850's"

Those crazy fried boiled eggs.

During coverage of the big Bay Area earthquake in...whatever year the quake happened during the World Series, I was very irritated at the news people for using the word thusly: "The freeway (house, bridge, etc.) literally collapsed." Yes, it's true, the top of the freeway did fall, but was there ever some question that its collapse might have been figurative?? (What they really meant was "The freeway fucking collapsed!")

Any Jamie Oliver tv show.

It's deliberate but it's so awesome I don't care:

when i was younger, there was no such thing as irony, and if there was, no decent person had ever heard of it. now--its irony in the shower, irony for breakfast, irony in your afternoon nap. irony has literally kidnapped everything good and decent and tied it to a chair and literally beaten it.

-- max, Tuesday, 26 August 2008 06:33 (Yesterday) Bookmark Link

joe

biden

stop

report all miscreants to this blog:

http://literally.barelyfitz.com/

“It is time for him to explain how eight years of deregulation policies have brought us to this dangerous ground,” Mr. Reid said. “And most importantly, it is time for him to explain how his plan — drafted literally under cover of darkness — will help America weather this storm.”

My colleague claimed to be literally on fire today.

She also uses 'to be brutally honest' for very mundane inoffensive truths.

I thought people had stopped doing this? I don't think I've heard anyone misuse literally in like 5 years.

I was literally glued to my seat

My favourite example of this stems from when a high school teacher told my class that if we didn't remember.... something or other... we'd be literally throwing marks down the drain. There was a guy in the class called Mark.

I remember a physics gcse class many years ago where my teacher told us that if we didn't do X in the exam, we'd literally be throwing marks down the drain.

There was a guy in the class called Mark and the idea of throwing him (and others like him obv.) down a drain was rather appealing.

― uptoeleven (uptoeleven), Monday, February 20, 2006 8:35 PM (2 years ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

Blimey! Search Enjinn's improved!

my teacher told us that if we didn't do X in the exam, we'd literally be throwing marks down the drain.

This is liberal schooling gone too far

especially when they've gone Euro

Popjustice says that the new Britney single is "literally quite good."

I've literally never heard anyone criticise this misuse before. I've literally said literally like this on purpose so many times that I literally sometimes use it in the wrong context on purpose. It's literally a pain in the face.

I meant to document this last week, but on CNN last Friday before the presidential debate, some commentator said that John McCain is going to have to literally reach out of the television and embrace the Americans watching the debate.

Man, that was a close one.

I seriously don't know if I could've literally held my shit together if a thing like that happened.

i hate it when words are literally misused, hehe

Joe Biden uses this literally--and I mean literally--every day.

I just misused "literally" in a way that gave me pause. Some old friend popped up on Facebook, like they do, and her status message was about being in the Air Force and doing all kinds of strength training and loads of push ups and such, and I said something dumb like, "Yeah! You were always made to kick ass, and now you can do it literally."

What I meant, of course, was that now she is physically strong in addition to being super cool. But literally doesn't mean one less level of figurative speech down from where you began, it means word-for-word. To literally kick ass, there must be an ass, and someone must be driving their foot into it with great force.

I feel stupid for employing one of my own linguistic pet peeves.

I guess wasn't a step down in how figurative the speech was. More of a lateral move.

"The Whig Party literally fell apart during the 1850's"

See, there's another borderline case. It's not a flat-out misuse of the word as much as it's an abuse of it, sticking it unnecessarily into a sentence as an intensifier. The sentence is fine without it.

maybe if she was a paratrooper she would be literally kicking ass ... but then I don't know all that much about the different branches of the military and whether anyone in the Air Force would be given training in hand to hand combat, or be in a position where they would employ those skills in the field.

Doesn't much matter, I don't think, unless I was trying to refer specifically to glutes and the kicking thereof.

it's not as egregious a misuse as if she were a legal secretary ...

Of course not, but that's exactly what bugs me about it. The thought will come through with its intended meaning, I'm sure, but it will still have a word in it that's totally wrong. I should have said "physically" instead, because it's what I meant.

Hey, if I don't edit my Facebook replies, who will?

well, I suppose if you posted your name and password on ilx, some ilxor might do so for the entertainment value ...

Oh, that'd be a hoot and a half.

would it literally be, though?

HOOOOOOT! Hoo.

That half a hoot really undermines any previous hooting.

"The Whig Party literally fell apart during the 1850's"

See, there's another borderline case. It's not a flat-out misuse of the word as much as it's an abuse of it, sticking it unnecessarily into a sentence as an intensifier. The sentence is fine without it.

― (I'm white, btw.) (kenan), Friday, July 24, 2009 2:50 AM (13 hours ago) Bookmark

No, this is not a borderline case. It is a flat-out misuse. The Whig Party did not "literally" fall apart. "Fall apart" is per se a metaphor when talking about anything that does not physically fall apart, hence not literal. Unless maybe the Whig party was all gathered on a ship and all fell off different sides of it.

When metaphors come, they come not single spies, but in battalions

ppl who care about other ppl misusing this word are fukken soulless

like literally soulless

eggxactly theyre fukken aberrations

To say that a thing "fell apart" meaning it decentralized, lost all organization, and scatterd is a level of abstraction I an willing to accept as very close to reality. yrmv.

this literally drives me up the wall when people do this

que voulez vous

http://www.chrisgenoa.com/archives/ex3lady2.jpg

wait, that's literally the ceiling

my bad

this literally drives me up the wall when people do this

Tell me is something eluding you, sunshine?
Is this not what you expected to see?

anyway guys, how do you know these people aren't just using the word 'littorally' in a non-literal manner

I for one am a big fan of clicking the litoris.

"We really can't afford, literally, to be locking people up unnecessarily, ineffectually and so pointlessly. More on less would be a saner approach," he says.

maybe they literally can't afford it? prison costs are spiralling.

yeah what is wrong with that?

i mean there is literally nothing wrong with it

Their policy of locking people up ineffectually might need looking at. Bigger locks guys.

literally can't afford bigger locks, that's the problem.

literally bigger locks are expensive
http://t2.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:W6HiNodAoWqerM:http://lh5.ggpht.com/_u1pYVqsbTG0/RvPBtZbgYDI/AAAAAAAABWM/rgUR9uj5MDg/DelhiDarshan%2B051.jpg

Just get smaller prisoners?

Children come cheap innit

i refer you to the fake baby thread.

anyway, denying the child labour market valuable resources imo

unless- we can get child prisoners to work somehow. hmmmm.

Just heard someone talking about the ring around Saturn which they've just recorded the existence of, on radio 4: said ring proves a hypothesis about one of Saturn's moons. I didn't hear the details of the hypothesis because I was too busy marvelling at the description of the several-million-miles-across ring as being "literally the smoking gun"

i watched a documentary film the other night where the smoking gun was literally in the ring around uranus

When I saw that story about Saturn this morning, I literally thought "I bet some people will be disappointed it's not Uranus"

happy literally as long as it's not mars

"Exactly."

actually

rectally

ah i see, i was looking at it as ...literally locking people... up, my bad

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-10-08/jones-chastises-critics-of-advertisers/4300268

"These people, through literally clogging up phone lines, email systems, Facebook and everything else, they really are making it in some cases almost impossible for these businesses to continue to function," he said.

From this news item about a woman mistakenly identified as pregnant by an airline - "my jaw literally fell on the floor"

(implied "literally"?)

This condition is becoming particularly severe for the group that economists call younger millennials: the young adults who entered the job market in the wake of the recession, a period in which the unemployment rate among 20- to 24-year-olds reached 17 percent, when graduate school competition grew more fierce and credit standards tightened. Many also saw their parents struggle through a pay cut, a job loss or another economic disruption during the recession.

These troubles, many economists fear, left serious scars, and not just psychic ones.

I was just thinking, if you "literally dwarf" someone, does that mean you turn them into a dwarf?

http://oi43.tinypic.com/9ulzlu.jpg

cool

WHAT

i just literally shit my pants at that

and i mean that literally

as in, i feel very strongly about that

Usage Note: For more than a hundred years, critics have remarked on the incoherency of using literally in a way that suggests the exact opposite of its primary sense of "in a manner that accords with the literal sense of the words." In 1926, for example, H.W. Fowler cited the example "The 300,000 Unionists ... will be literally thrown to the wolves." The practice does not stem from a change in the meaning of literally itself--if it did, the word would long since have come to mean "virtually" or "figuratively" but from a natural tendency to use the word as a general intensive, as in They had literally no help from the government on the project, where no contrast with the figurative sense of the words is intended.

I am literally tearing the skin off of my face and throwing it at the computer screen

http://www.thefreedictionary.com/literally?s=t

literally an intensive

descriptivists win again!
http://www.hdwpapers.com/thumbs/charlie_brown_happy_wallpaper-t2.jpg

http://i975.photobucket.com/albums/ae232/daggerlee/6E6B8B4E-D25F-4130-A55D-701988CB912F-339-0000001A8A9067BA_zps3fd3354a.jpg

sweet domain name tho

aa.com/literallyflybetter

they used it correctly!

what does "quite literally" mean, though? "actually literally" or "completely literally"?

that copy reads like: "hey, look, we're using 'literally' in the literal sense here, not figuratively as an intensive."

'you would be surprised how literally'

literally literally

what does it mean to literally raise the bar

The bar, it is in the air. When once it was on the ground.

Problem is that if you do read that sentence with 'literally raising the bar' actually being literal, it stops making sense. 'We're quite literally raising the bar' is fine. Adding '...on what flying should be' only makes sense if you're being figurative.

"We are serving you alcohol while in the air on what flying should be"? Nope.

"Our booze is served during the journey on what flying should be"? Nuh-uh.

"Look how high our drinks are on what flying should be"? Noooooo.

maybe there is a giant immobilizing metal bar resting on one of their planes and "what flying should be" is yodaspeak for "what should be flying"

it makes sense, but it's pretty corny... reminds me of some bad pun Bob Saget would use on America's Funniest Home Videos. i read it like "we're literally raising the bar! on what flying should be". cue goofy music and canned audience laughter as a drunk passenger stumbles around and vomits on an old lady.

* laughs *

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oPz4mKHd0FE

The thing is that when I hear the world 'literally' used like this in the wild, person is nearly always saying something enthusiastic, impressed, excited or good humoured

i thought this was a good one. there is a hotel in boston whose restaurant is called the ruby room, and suitably the decor is all red. the section for corporate events is headed:

Meetings that will have you seeing red. Well, not literally.

so precisely and completely wrong, really an accomplishment

idk you could be blind & irascible

Palm trees, ivory beaches and a languid lifestyle: to outsiders, the South Pacific lives up to its paradise image. But the islanders themselves are weighed down by problems – literally. The region has the world's highest obesity rates, along with associated chronic diseases.

it means "listen to me"

literally one month ago

https://ig.me/am8rz2YnB48osC

The misuse of "literally" is most often an attempt at hyperbole, in the mistaken belief that overstating the truth makes one's misstatements stronger and more persuasive.

LITERALLY vs ACTUALLY vs Just say it vs Shut up

posters itt are literally cops

literal lol