Literally nuts

Welcome to the "People do it so that's okay then" school of English, Mr Thomas Chivers. His argument goes: some good writers have misused "literally" "so we're wrong to criticise Jamie Redknapp" for doing it.

David Morrison makes a good point in the comments:
Writer and comedian Paul Parry was scathing about the Deputy Prime Minister's slip. He told Today: "This is probably the worst thing Nick Clegg has ever done. He's just completely misusing the word."

He added: "It's not about pedantry, it's about communication. The key thing is the word 'literally' is a safe word.

"We've got a wonderful, floral language. You can say that you've got itchy feet, that you'd kill for a cup of coffee, that you'd bring the house down, that you've got a frog in your throat, but ultimately you need to be
able to show that words have a literal meaning as well.


"There is no other word that means 'literally' and if the word 'literally''s meaning is eroded by all this misuse then there is nothing to replace it and we'll get a lot more confusion."

A local newspaper reader is angry...

What is it with local-newspaper journalists? Are the courses that churn them out really so bad? Or should we blame their editors? I'm sure they must know how irritating their style is, but they won't give up. You know what I mean; take our local paper the Great Barr Observer: it can never get straight to the point. It's never "Khalid Mahmood did X", it's always "A local MP did X". It's never "Great Barr School pupils have done Y", it's always "Pupils at a local school have done Y." It's at its most farcical when there is only one possibility. So Asda becomes "a local superstore" even though Asda is the only local superstore.

Are there any local papers that eschew this indefinitism? If there are, their readers are truly blessed.

The blog of unnecessary-hyphens

It's clear that few people know how to use hyphens, but I'd like to think that BBC staff had some idea. Alas, this morning their news site includes the headline:

British Airways' £50m loss smaller-than-expected

I'll add a couple more examples later. The title of this post comes from the "blog" of unnecessary quotation marks.