{"id":41,"date":"2008-04-18T09:17:15","date_gmt":"2008-04-18T08:17:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.literaryconnections.co.uk\/?p=41"},"modified":"2010-04-20T18:29:42","modified_gmt":"2010-04-20T17:29:42","slug":"taking-it-too-literally","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.literaryconnections.co.uk\/?p=41","title":{"rendered":"Taking it too literally?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>BBC correspondent David Willey reported on the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.bbc.co.uk\/radio4\/today\/\" target=\"_blank\">Today programme<\/a> this morning that the Pope had met a group of men and women &#8216;whose lives have literally been destroyed&#8217; by abuse in the Catholic Church. This took place in &#8216;the residence of the Papal Nuncio in Washington&#8217; which is not, I understand, in the afterlife (<a href=\"http:\/\/internetshakespeare.uvic.ca\/Library\/SLT\/ideas\/death2.html\" target=\"_blank\">&#8216;that undiscovered country&#8217;<\/a>, etc). David Willey was therefore stretching the definition of &#8216;destroyed&#8217;, surely, to add &#8216;literally&#8217; as an intensifier? (If you&#8217;re quick, you can hear him for yourself <a href=\"http:\/\/www.bbc.co.uk\/radio4\/today\/listenagain\/ram\/today1_20080418.ram\">here<\/a>.) <!--more--><\/p>\n<p>Of course, Willey (whose measured tones give the impression that his time in Rome has included retreats with sages of the Church) is not alone in taking &#8216;literally&#8217; too metaphorically, as I discovered from a link on the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.jeffdeck.com\/teal\/blog\/\">TEAL site<\/a>. There is, as you would expect, a web log called <a href=\"http:\/\/literally.barelyfitz.com\/\">Literally<\/a>: &#8216;an English language grammar blog tracking abuse of the word \u201cliterally\u201d&#8217;. Its masthead is a log (not literally, of course, just a photograph &#8211; and I can&#8217;t see whether it has a cobweb on it).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Use and abuse of the word &#8216;literally&#8217;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[46],"class_list":["post-41","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-words","tag-pope"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.literaryconnections.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.literaryconnections.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.literaryconnections.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.literaryconnections.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.literaryconnections.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=41"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blog.literaryconnections.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":275,"href":"https:\/\/blog.literaryconnections.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41\/revisions\/275"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.literaryconnections.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=41"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.literaryconnections.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=41"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.literaryconnections.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=41"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}