Microsoft Office autoupdates always make me nervous.
Literally a new edition of Fowler
Languagehat.com reports on a new edition of H. W. Fowler’s A Dictionary of Modern English Usage. I have a copy of the second edition, so I can’t say if the entry below derives from Fowler or from the equally wonderfully named Sir Ernest Gowers (who revised the text in the 1960s), but it’s a characteristically dry dismantling of a certain misuse of language that I’d assumed was only a modern complaint. It seems, however, that it’s been going on for ages, figuratively speaking. (Or, if it’s an addition of Gower’s, literally decades.)
literally. We have come to such a pass with this emphasizer that where the truth would require us to insert with a strong expression ‘not [literally], of course, but in a manner of speaking’, we do not hesitate to insert the very word that we ought to be at pains to repudiate […] The Prime Minister sat through the debate [literally] glued to the Treasury bench […]
I have to apologise to the student I recently mentored, who used the word in a story I was critiquing. I didn’t exactly quote the above, but I came close.
Nip it in the bud, I say. (In a manner of speaking.)
I swear I vacuumed this floor mere days ago, now it looks like a dandruffing mammoth has slept on it.
If the measure of ironing excellence was “add more creases”, I would be considered excellent at ironing.
If you need to come to my house to convince me of the benefits of your product, I suspect it’s because there are none.
