From my pal Dave Rice: "This morning's Today Show segment on last-minute Halloween costumes was interrupted by a news update in which Brian Williams announced that Dick Cheney's Chief of Staff Lewis 'Scooter' Libby had been indicted on several counts (obstruction of justice, making false statements, perjury), and that '...the pieces of paper are literally being handed out by court officers as we speak...'"

Now that's some precise, insider reporting.

Maybe someday Vanita will grace us with a post.

From John Fund's column on Monday: "Given Mr. Bush's idée fixe that the nominee had to be a woman, it's possible the White House allowed itself to be pushed into a corner in which Ms. Miers was literally the only female left."

Apparently there are only 6 women in the nation potentially qualified for O'Connor's seat.

More humorously, SMU's president responds to slams against the law school for its non-ivy league ranking:

"I literally thought when it was announced there would be a huge fuss that she was not an Ivy League graduate."

Apparently the act of thinking is so rare where Harriet Miers went to school that one must insert a qualifier in the phrase "I thought," lest the hearer think it's an exaggeration.

Personally, absent all the other issues, I think it would be nice to have more Supreme Court justices who aren't in the ivy league clique.

I was going to go as Miers for Halloween, but I ran out of eyeliner.

Yoo so fine

Today at Boalt some non-students walked into Professor John Yoo's class dressed as Abu Ghraib prisoners. They were in orange jumpsuits, and one was hooded with a rope/leash around his neck. According to Gavin, one of the protestors, they asked Yoo to hold the leash. Yoo left the room. The students in the class were pissed that it was interrupted, but the class was almost over anyway. Then the demonstrators hung out in our lobby, passing out flyers, and one student got into a shouting match with the hooded guy. Many cops came and cited some of the demonstrators, and took pictures and video of all of them. A few students got into debates with them and each other. I skipped all but 10 minutes of my class that hour.

Later in the afternoon I overheard a tiny bit of a conversation about it outside the hallway. One person excitedly told the other: "They literally were all in his face!"

Then, in a comment to Armen's post (see above) by Joe Shmo: "...the executive branch office with the greatest legal authority to do so declared that Yoo's legal analysis was wrong. This means Yoo was literally advising his client that it was legal to engage in behavior which was in fact illegal."

Waiting for Vanita

It was originally Vanita's idea to archive uses of the word, after I mentioned to her how much it had been bothering me to hear the word abused all the time. She sent me, via snail mail, a NYT clipping with a note that said in part: "I can't help it: now I want to start an archive."

Here's the full article she sent. I still don't know if I think this is proper usage or not. But I think maybe so: "Even during the years Latin American governments were indifferent to the subject, human rights groups kept plugging away, building cases against offenders who they were sure had literally gotten away with murder."

Depends on how literal you wanna be. In some ways it sounds like the dish running away with the spoon.

Vanita was always supposed to co-host this little blog, but right now we're having technical difficulties. Stay tuned.

Oh, and Vanita used to report for the San Antonio Express-News. Her articles were typo- and error-free.

Still procrastinating

A few years back, Robert Fulford wrote a column about the "literally" problem. Among his examples of misuse is: "I literally died laughing." My grandmother had a friend who literally died laughing. She got so tickled at dinner with friends one night she had a heart attack.

Foregone conclusions

Ah, the San Antonio Express-News. Pioneering print journalism without copy editing. When I lived there, among other typos, the Express-News misspelled "El Salvador" in a headline. I forget how they spelled it. It was a matter of (not very much) time that the paper would find its way into my little old blog. Aren't all statue unveilings literal unveilings?

On the other hand, here's a nice usage from up north.

Retired Husband Syndrome symptoms include stomach ulcers, slurred speech, rashes, and throat polyps.

Household uses

Yesterday the man in my life said he needed the car "literally all day" on Thursday.

He was literally in the belly of the beast

Here's a favorite memory regarding the word "literally". This was one of those times when you wish the person were misusing the word. I grew up Methodist, but my congregation was a really conservative one. The Methodist church would sometimes send us pastors that were a little more liberal than folks would have liked. When I was about 16, they sent us a new associate pastor/youth minister. Soon after she arrived, parents were concerned that she might be too liberal for their teenage kids. There was a big meeting with her -- couched as welcome and fellowship. A chief concern was whether she would be teaching us that everything in the Bible was literally true. Of course, these Bible literalists pick and choose what's literal and what isn't. One father there told the pastor that he wanted her to present everything from the Bible as historically, literally true; he gave the example of Jonah and the whale. He said he wanted her to teach us that a man named Jonah was literally swallowed by a whale and lived through it to become a prophet/missionary.

The pastor handled the meeting with aplomb, like a progressive, subtle John Roberts. And over the next few years proceeded to present biblical meaning to us in ways our parents would not have appreciated. Her final Sunday at our church was "Youth Sunday," and as a group we went all out to report to the congregation that God might be a girl. She now runs a B&B in Arkansas, and I'm an atheist.

BBC headline: "Bush God comments 'not literal' "

"A Palestinian official who said the US president had claimed God told him to invade Iraq and Afghanistan says he did not take George Bush's words literally."

What George Bush said: "God would tell me, George, go and fight those terrorists in Afghanistan. And I did, and then God would tell me, George, go and end the tyranny in Iraq... And I did. And now, again, I feel God's words coming to me, Go get the Palestinians their state and get the Israelis their security, and get peace in the Middle East. And by God I'm gonna do it."

Life has no real meaning.

A little white Corvette, linguistics rock star Stanley Fish's vehicle of choice.

Stanley Fish once wrote: "[A]ny reading that is plain and obvious in the light of some assumed purpose (and it is impossible not to assume one) is a literal reading, but no reading is the literal reading in the sense that it is available apart from any purpose whatsoever. A sentence is never not in a context. We are never not in a situation... A set of interpretive assumptions is always in force. A sentence that seems to need no interpretation is already the product of one... A sentence neither means anything at all, nor does it always mean the same thing." 4 Critical Inquiry 625 (Summer 1978).

That said, my contract law textbook,* riddled with typos to begin with, irked me last night. In contract law, courts often look to whether there was a "meeting of the minds" between contracting parties in determining whether both parties entered into a contract with the same understanding of its terms. In an effort at clarification on this point, my book says, "[D]ifficulties will arise if the requirement of a 'meeting of the minds' is taken literally." I'll say.

*Fuller, Lon. L. and Eisenberg, Melvin A. Basic Contract Law, Seventh Edition. St. Paul: West Group. 2001.

Barry Bonds

Remember that dispute over who caught Barry Bonds' record homerun baseball a few years ago? An interesting California Superior Court decision resulted (linked above). See footnote 23 of this decision on page 7. This startled me in the Boalt Hall library the other day. It appears among an inordinate amount of lengthy, boring footnotes. Misuse of the word? I think so. I personally was unaware of this man's intentions on the date in question until I read this decision.

Inaugural post

There are two major categories of misuse of the word "literally:" 1) Use of the word to modify a phrase that is clearly capable of being literally true. Examples: "I am literally tired right now." "I literally ate the whole hamburger." 2) Use of the word to modify a phrase that cannot possibly be literally true, often a cliche. Examples: "You are literally getting on my last nerve!" "I literally paid an arm and a leg for those shoes." Both categories reveal common understanding and usage of "literally" as a word of emphasis, not of clarification. Yes, language evolves. But it also devolves. Send us your favorite examples of uses and misuses. This is your safe space to be annoying and literally anal retentive about language.