illiterally

Devil's Dictionary defines "literally" thus:

The sound a human rectum makes when trying to pronounce the word "figuratively."

We're not alone.

It's official. "Literally" is the new political back-tracking mechanism. It worked for Alito, why not for Bush? Makes you question his intended meaning of the words "citizens" and "Social Security" and "freedom" and "weapons of mass destruction."

From Knight-Ridder: "One day after President Bush vowed to reduce America's dependence on Middle East oil by cutting imports from there 75 percent by 2025, his energy secretary and national economic adviser said Wednesday that the president didn't mean it literally.

"What the president meant, they said in a conference call with reporters, was that alternative fuels could displace an amount of oil imports equivalent to most of what America is expected to import from the Middle East in 2025."

What Bush said in the address: "Breakthroughs on this and other new technologies will help us reach another great goal: to replace more than 75 percent of our oil imports from the Middle East by 2025."

This morning in class a beloved and oft impassioned classmate commented, "But what if the defendants LITERALLY don't know...?" (The context will only bore you.)

Apparently it's possible figuratively not to know something. This afternoon another friend told me she heard someone say today that they literally didn't know something.

Is it the difference between intuition and empirical knowledge, or between truth and belief? Is it a question of knowledge relativity? Who knows?

This evening, a random law student, commenting on a discussion she had with two other people, said, "I was literally like, if I had to choose who was the bigger dork in that conversation, I wouldn't have been able to."

She didn't need to be emphatic about this. One could say this about almost any overheard conversation between law students. Some recent snippets from my personal sonic environment:

"Well, [chuckle] I'm going to adopt the Holmesian position and argue that..."

"They're asymmetrical power systems."

"Let's go get fucked up in the Mission District next weekend."

"But [dismissive chuckling] my civ pro professor was a critical race theorist, so, you know."

Back in my research class. Tuesday's guest speaker is here again today. He just said, "...you might need to go literally into the Library [of Congress], into the archives, to research..." As opposed to just searching the limited archives here.

Also, wanna subvert the Google search paradigm's power over your life? Viva Vivisimo's clusters.

Walking down the street the other day, a guy passed me quickly on the sidewalk. He said into his cell phone, "I literally only have ten seconds to talk to you..."

Six seconds and counting.