literally

[Victor Steinbok]

I've seen both of your pieces, now that you mention it, but could not
recall when and where and this was just a side search, in response to
the amusements from last night. I thought it might have been here, but
suspected it was Language Log, which is why I did not specify. Unlike
most of my posts, it took me about 10 minutes to put it together on a
sputtering computer, so I'll just chalk up not finding other coverage to
laziness. In any case, thanks for the reminders.

     VS-)

On 3/23/2010 7:57 PM, Benjamin Zimmer wrote:
> On Tue, Mar 23, 2010 at 4:04 PM, Victor Steinbok<aardvark66 at gmail.com>  wrote:
>
>> I wanted to come back to this one more time--I am sure it's been
>> mentioned before (and if not here, surely elsewhere--
>> http://bit.ly/dti9fg ). I hate doing it from on-air comments that I
>> overheard and cannot reproduce as evidence, but so it goes.
>>
>> There is a general tendency--I want to say "recently" but want to avoid
>> a potential recency bias--to use the word "literally" as an emphasis on
>> top of the already figurative use.
>>
> A good place to start is Jesse Sheidlower's 2005 piece for Slate:
>
> http://www.slate.com/id/2129105/
>
> I followed up on Language Log:
>
> http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/002611.html
>
> ...and also wrote on the topic more recently for Word Routes:
>
> http://www.visualthesaurus.com/cm/wordroutes/1499/
>
>
> --Ben Zimmer
>

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