Literally

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A little thread to record misues of the word "literally".

As an example, BBC commentators covering the bob skeleton last night said that Shelly Rudman was "literally flying down the track."

No, she wasn't. That would have been cheating. She was sliding down the track at high speed.

― Hello Sunshine (Hello Sunshine), Friday, 17 February 2006 09:58 (nineteen years ago)

"He's literally on fire tonight." Cricket commentator Mark Nicholas describing Australian captain Ricky Ponting during Tuesday's match.
Poor Ricky.

― stu (stu), Friday, 17 February 2006 10:10 (nineteen years ago)

Builder's 'screw you' not literal

― Alba (Alba), Friday, 17 February 2006 10:11 (nineteen years ago)

hopefully this thread will get a lot of answers.

― fortunate hazel (f. hazel), Friday, 17 February 2006 11:35 (nineteen years ago)

Aye, it's literally dying here.

― Onimo (GerryNemo), Friday, 17 February 2006 11:37 (nineteen years ago)

but really i could care less.

― fortunate hazel (f. hazel), Friday, 17 February 2006 11:38 (nineteen years ago)

The Daily Mail on A Streetcar Named Desire: 'The film literally sweats atmosphere'

― beanz (beanz), Friday, 17 February 2006 11:55 (nineteen years ago)

Searching ILX for 'literally' returns lots of messages moaning about the incorrect use of 'literally'. Whodathunkit?

― Onimo (GerryNemo), Friday, 17 February 2006 12:00 (nineteen years ago)

ILX is one of the more unique message boards on the internet.

― fortunate hazel (f. hazel), Friday, 17 February 2006 12:09 (nineteen years ago)

It is literally ON the internet.

― Sororah T Massacre (blueski), Friday, 17 February 2006 12:13 (nineteen years ago)

The data proves it

― beanz (beanz), Friday, 17 February 2006 12:15 (nineteen years ago)

The media says so

― beanz (beanz), Friday, 17 February 2006 12:15 (nineteen years ago)

after a while it impacts the way you think about things.

― fortunate hazel (f. hazel), Friday, 17 February 2006 12:19 (nineteen years ago)

"I literaturally had to write a book last night!"
Is that correct?

― Mr Jones (Mr Jones), Friday, 17 February 2006 12:42 (nineteen years ago)

You got it literarily wrong

― beanz (beanz), Friday, 17 February 2006 13:03 (nineteen years ago)

Bill Clinton used to do this all the time, "It literally took forever for the Republican leadership to send me a budget that I could sign..."

― Pleasant Plains /// (Pleasant Plains ///), Friday, 17 February 2006 15:09 (nineteen years ago)

What this thread should become is a cartoon thread where all the drawing folks and the MS painters show what it would be like if these misuses of literally literally happened.

― Huk-L (Huk-L), Friday, 17 February 2006 15:12 (nineteen years ago)

And, fwiw, my favourite misuse of literally is when it's switched for liberally, as in: This pizza is LITERALLY covered in cheese!!!

― Huk-L (Huk-L), Friday, 17 February 2006 15:13 (nineteen years ago)

ok someone got pissy with me for doing this just the other night. pish.

― sunny successor (katharine), Friday, 17 February 2006 15:20 (nineteen years ago)

literally?

― Huk-L (Huk-L), Friday, 17 February 2006 15:21 (nineteen years ago)

can't you use 'literally' ummm not literally? i'm not saying it is correct, but in every day speech are there not certain words with certain degrees of acceptable misuse? an agreeable embellishment? everyone knows what the word means.

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?

― sunny successor (katharine), Friday, 17 February 2006 15:38 (nineteen years ago)

This pizza is METAPHORICALLY covered in cheese!!!

― Mädchen (Madchen), Friday, 17 February 2006 15:42 (nineteen years ago)

I'm literally sick and tired of talking about this word (pukes all over keyboard and falls asleep in the puddle)

― Abbadavid Berman (Hurting), Friday, 17 February 2006 15:44 (nineteen years ago)

there are so many words in the english language! why keep using the wrong one when there are all these right ones to choose from?

― Lenny and Squiggy Present Lenny and the Squigtones (Jody Beth Rosen), Friday, 17 February 2006 15:46 (nineteen years ago)

But that would be so gay.

― Tracer Hand (tracerhand), Friday, 17 February 2006 16:01 (nineteen years ago)

These right ones right here?

― Alba (Alba), Friday, 17 February 2006 16:02 (nineteen years ago)

Words, usages, and phrases that annoy the shit out of you...

― elmo, patron saint of nausea (allocryptic), Friday, 17 February 2006 16:03 (nineteen years ago)

yall are pretty smart for noticing this

― ,,, Friday, 17 February 2006 16:05 (nineteen years ago)

haha

― mark p (Mark P), Friday, 17 February 2006 16:06 (nineteen years ago)

The theme song to the TV series of Clueless started out:
She is literally the polaroid of perfection

― Abbott (Abbott), Friday, 17 February 2006 16:09 (nineteen years ago)

This pizza is METAPHORICALLY covered in cheese!!!

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'.

― Tehrannosaurus HoBB (the pirate king), Friday, 17 February 2006 17:37 (nineteen years ago)

from one of the contestants on the australian version of The Biggest Loser:

"i literally shat my pants"

umm... are you sure?

― electric sound of jim (and why not) (electricsound), Saturday, 18 February 2006 07:17 (nineteen years ago)

I literally ate my breakfast - I literally had to EAT it!

― Mr Jones (Mr Jones), Saturday, 18 February 2006 12:23 (nineteen years ago)

'As is often the case, though, such "abuses" have a long and esteemed history in English. The ground was not especially sticky in Little Women when Louisa May Alcott wrote that "the land literally flowed with milk and honey," nor was Tom Sawyer turning somersaults on piles of money when Twain described him as "literally rolling in wealth," nor was Jay Gatsby shining when Fitzgerald wrote that "he literally glowed," nor were Bach and Beethoven squeezed into a fedora when Joyce wrote in Ulysses that a Mozart piece was "the acme of first class music as such, literally knocking everything else into a cocked hat." Such examples are easily come by, even in the works of the authors we are often told to emulate.'

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

― t_g, Monday, 20 February 2006 00:04 (nineteen years ago)

Who suggests emulating Alcott, Twain, Fitzgerald or Joyce?

― beanz (beanz), Monday, 20 February 2006 10:12 (nineteen years ago)

I pity da foo' that tries it. Literarily.

― Zora (Zora), Monday, 20 February 2006 16:28 (nineteen years ago)

That suggestion has literally swept me off my feet.

― Redd Harvest (Ken L), Monday, 20 February 2006 17:04 (nineteen years ago)

I thought when the big-time authors used it, it was a, hem, literary technique, and they were using the vocabularies of the characters they were talking about, even if they were writing in the third person. This is known as style indirect libre or free indirect speech.

― Redd Harvest (Ken L), Monday, 20 February 2006 17:07 (nineteen years ago)

And yeah, Hurting otm.

― Redd Harvest (Ken L), Monday, 20 February 2006 17:11 (nineteen years ago)

I'm literally on the money as well, sitting on my wallet.

― Pleasant Plains /// (Pleasant Plains ///), Monday, 20 February 2006 18:37 (nineteen years ago)

i can't be arsed to add to the academic debate over the use of this word.

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, 20 February 2006 20:35 (nineteen years ago)

i prefer 'supposably'.

― Fritz Wollner (Fritz), Monday, 20 February 2006 20:40 (nineteen years ago)

Irregardless of that...

― Redd Harvest (Ken L), Tuesday, 21 February 2006 06:12 (nineteen years ago)

can't be arsed to add to the academic debate over the use of this word.

was that deliberate?

TS: literally vs. it's academic

― Bob Six (bobbysix), Tuesday, 21 February 2006 13:43 (nineteen years ago)

it's literally academic now

― ken c (ken c), Tuesday, 21 February 2006 14:13 (nineteen years ago)

Oh yes, a completely intentional jeu de mots.

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

― uptoeleven (uptoeleven), Tuesday, 21 February 2006 15:07 (nineteen years ago)

ha ha auto-antonyms bitches fu

― jhoshea (scoopsnoodle), Tuesday, 21 February 2006 15:17 (nineteen years ago)

I figuratively hate school marmin' language police WHO HAVE NO IDEA WHAT THEY'RE TALKING ABOUT!

FUFUFUFUFUFUFUFUFU!!!!

― jhoshea (scoopsnoodle), Tuesday, 21 February 2006 15:20 (nineteen years ago)

William Safire is your dark retarded overlord.

― jhoshea (scoopsnoodle), Tuesday, 21 February 2006 15:22 (nineteen years ago)

stfu noob

― ken c (ken c), Tuesday, 21 February 2006 15:44 (nineteen years ago)

Skipping 66 messages at this point... Click here if you want to load them all.

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

― Brewer's Bitch (darraghmac), Tuesday, 6 October 2009 10:37 (sixteen years ago)

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"

― thomp, Wednesday, 7 October 2009 12:34 (sixteen years ago)

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

― ken "save-a-finn" c (ken c), Wednesday, 7 October 2009 12:40 (sixteen years ago)

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

― Mark G, Wednesday, 7 October 2009 12:45 (sixteen years ago)

happy literally as long as it's not mars

― ken "save-a-finn" c (ken c), Wednesday, 7 October 2009 12:48 (sixteen years ago)

"Exactly."

― krakow, Wednesday, 7 October 2009 12:48 (sixteen years ago)

actually

― kamerad, Wednesday, 7 October 2009 14:08 (sixteen years ago)

rectally

― ken "save-a-finn" c (ken c), Wednesday, 7 October 2009 14:15 (sixteen years ago)

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

― Great Scott! It's Molecular Man. (Ste), Wednesday, 7 October 2009 20:53 (sixteen years ago)

three years pass...

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.

― Autumn Almanac, Sunday, 7 October 2012 20:36 (thirteen years ago)

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

― qiqing, Tuesday, 9 October 2012 21:29 (thirteen years ago)

five months pass...

(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.

― space phwoar (Hurting 2), Wednesday, 27 March 2013 13:32 (twelve years ago)

two months pass...

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

― i don't even have an internet (Hurting 2), Wednesday, 5 June 2013 21:51 (twelve years ago)

two months pass...

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

― Merdeyeux, Monday, 12 August 2013 13:59 (twelve years ago)

cool

― congratulations (n/a), Monday, 12 August 2013 17:19 (twelve years ago)

WHAT

― TracerHandVEVO (Tracer Hand), Monday, 12 August 2013 17:20 (twelve years ago)

i just literally shit my pants at that

― Z S, Monday, 12 August 2013 17:25 (twelve years ago)

and i mean that literally

― Z S, Monday, 12 August 2013 17:25 (twelve years ago)

as in, i feel very strongly about that

― Z S, Monday, 12 August 2013 17:25 (twelve years ago)

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.

― fit and working again, Monday, 12 August 2013 17:26 (twelve years ago)

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

― OH MY GOD HE'S OOGLY (DJP), Monday, 12 August 2013 17:27 (twelve years ago)

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

― fit and working again, Monday, 12 August 2013 17:28 (twelve years ago)

literally an intensive

― BIG HOOS aka the denigrated boogeyman (BIG HOOS aka the steendriver), Monday, 12 August 2013 18:19 (twelve years ago)

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

― Philip Nunez, Monday, 12 August 2013 18:36 (twelve years ago)

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

― 乒乓, Wednesday, 14 August 2013 20:37 (twelve years ago)

sweet domain name tho

― markers, Wednesday, 14 August 2013 20:39 (twelve years ago)

aa.com/literallyflybetter

― In the airplane over the .CSS (Le Bateau Ivre), Thursday, 15 August 2013 01:19 (twelve years ago)

they used it correctly!

― fit and working again, Thursday, 15 August 2013 01:40 (twelve years ago)

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."

― slugbuggy, Thursday, 15 August 2013 15:18 (twelve years ago)

'you would be surprised how literally'

― j., Thursday, 15 August 2013 15:21 (twelve years ago)

literally literally

― I tweeted too much and I am in jail. (crüt), Thursday, 15 August 2013 15:21 (twelve years ago)

what does it mean to literally raise the bar

― 乒乓, Thursday, 15 August 2013 15:24 (twelve years ago)

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

― emil.y, Thursday, 15 August 2013 15:26 (twelve years ago)

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.

― emil.y, Thursday, 15 August 2013 15:27 (twelve years ago)

"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.

― emil.y, Thursday, 15 August 2013 15:29 (twelve years ago)

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"

― I tweeted too much and I am in jail. (crüt), Thursday, 15 August 2013 15:33 (twelve years ago)

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.

― Spectrum, Thursday, 15 August 2013 15:36 (twelve years ago)

* laughs *

― BIG HOOS aka the denigrated boogeyman (BIG HOOS aka the steendriver), Thursday, 15 August 2013 15:52 (twelve years ago)

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

― In the airplane over the .CSS (Le Bateau Ivre), Thursday, 15 August 2013 16:04 (twelve years ago)

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

― cardamon, Friday, 16 August 2013 00:20 (twelve years ago)

three months pass...

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

― Roberto Spiralli, Saturday, 7 December 2013 22:49 (twelve years ago)

idk you could be blind & irascible

― veneer timber (imago), Saturday, 7 December 2013 23:05 (twelve years ago)

seven months pass...

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.

― Little Saint Hugh of Lincoln (nakhchivan), Friday, 11 July 2014 23:02 (eleven years ago)

it means "listen to me"

― brimstead, Friday, 11 July 2014 23:06 (eleven years ago)

three years pass...

literally one month ago

― calstars, Monday, 28 May 2018 03:01 (seven years ago)

one month passes...

https://ig.me/am8rz2YnB48osC

― calstars, Wednesday, 25 July 2018 00:13 (seven years ago)

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.

― A is for (Aimless), Wednesday, 25 July 2018 03:56 (seven years ago)

eight months pass...

LITERALLY vs ACTUALLY vs Just say it vs Shut up

― calstars, Wednesday, 24 April 2019 16:38 (six years ago)

posters itt are literally cops

― difficult listening hour, Wednesday, 24 April 2019 17:11 (six years ago)

literal lol

― j., Wednesday, 24 April 2019 18:42 (six years ago)

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