This one's long.

"That's what she said:" sometimes it's another way of asking, "Literally?"

Think about it - you could respond either way to any of the following:

"You almost poked me in the eye with that thing!"

"You really think you can go all day long?"

"He's got a really big head." (Sorry.)

"Go ahead, put it wherever you want."



That's-what-she-said montage from The Office:
(the best is the deposition episode wherein Jan's attorney takes Michael's that's-what-she-said joke literally)



A few choice lines from Star Wars:

NSFW

In some advice to a novice BDSM domme, Dan Savage tells her to put herself out there in the adult kink world, and she'll easily find someone: “You will literally enjoy beating the guys off with a stick that are gonna come on their hands and knees begging you to be their . . . mistress.”

I count three possible meanings in that sentence, one of them definitely literal.

Podcast here - scroll down for episode 58. It's toward the end of the show (some questionable advice is dispensed earlier in the podcast).

What?! I'm studying!

Is Poindexter a pollster now?

"Now you can literally bet on climate change"

Relatedly, the Dallas Morning News and others didn't mean it literally this morning when they said a bunch of big energy-sucking corporations were going to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 90%.

Said corporations will instead "ensure" that they "strive" to "create incentives" to "lessen" their climate "impact" by "proactively" "seeking" "effective" "green" "solutions."