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."

Pink Ladies

It's finals season, and I'm running low on procrastination tools. So I'm back.

First up:

"Pink-Clad Indian Women Fight (Literally) For Justice"

Someone dressed in pink is getting results.

You might say this leaves egg on the face of Code Pink, literally.

Check out The Colbert Report's recent piece on Libya. "Throw Mexico in there, and you can literally go from the Halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli."

Can't escape it.

I flew all the way to Europe to get away from the societal scourge that is "literally-abuse." It didn't work. Tonight on international CNN, they had some special about some high-ranking guy at Nissan. I wasn't paying attention. Someone said, "He can literally walk in the room because he knows the cars so well." The meaning I gleaned from context was that he can just walk into any showroom and sell/talk about the cars without any preparation.

Over the course of the summer, depending on the rate at which I learn some French, we'll examine some of the ways Francophones use "literalment." Too early for that yet, though.

Are you ready?

The government is still not communicating with us literally. Or is it?