... they would say...I am literally swamped with work.
... dropping the -ly from "literally".I am literal swamped with work.
This drives me nuts. Not because I'm a grammar cop. It simply hurts my ear. ("It simple hurts my ear." - can you stand that?)
First it was one person, then multiple people. Then, horrified, I started seeing it in print. Here is the most recent offender.
The offensive fragment is "Man previous convicted...", which should read "previously convicted". I guarantee this is not a typo. This is how the author (and obviously his editor) speaks. Why he didn't go for the double whammy and drop the -ly in "allegedly strikes" is anyone's guess. Maybe because it didn't sound right? Maybe because it sounded bad enough already?
OK, here's another one, which you could conceivably (conveivable?) blame on Twitter's character limit, but this guy, whoever the fuck he is (I hate retweets), had 18 characters to spare...
Again, I guarantee this is how he speaks. Do I have to spell it out? It should be "absolutely love it".
How wrong is this? I got 912,000 hits on Google for "absolute love it" and 80,000,000 hits for "absolutely love it".
Where the fuck does this come from?
04/16/2011 — Here we go again...
HELL NO!
OK, the guy's name is "Sergey", so he's probably not a native English speaker.
The guy who wrote or translated this article got "temporarily crippled" right but absolutely blew it with "repeated delayed"...
09/17/2011
I would've let this slide because it was Twitter but "inevitably" has the same number of characters.
I never forget.12/14/2011 Here we have yet another fine example, this time from Security Week...
Oh, come on, people!
I have to assume this was on purpose, because nobody talks like that, right?
I took some liberties with the image. See if you can guess what they were. The original is here.
03/08/2012
SHAME ON GLENN S. PHILIPS!!!! For this crap, published in Dark Reading...
Why stop at "possible understand"? Why not "communicate effective" or "discussed sensible"?
NO excuse.
NONE!
03/29/2012
If you could see me now you would be able to tell that I am visibly upset by the content of this story from WSOC-TV in North Carolina, which contains the following sentence...
If you watch the video, you will hear the reporter, Andrew Doud, say "visibly upset", so whoever made the transcription decided to "correct" him.
I hate when that happens.
06/28/2012
Hey look boys and girls! I'm not the only one bothered by this crap...
I have been seeing "remote exploitable" for a long, long time and I just have to grit my teeth every freakin time it pops up and it pops up all the fucking time, mostly from a Certain Security Company That Will Remain Nameless.
I appreciate that the editor tried to correct this doofus, but I would have gone with (sic) instead of (sp).
If you half to ax the question, you probable alread know the answer.
ReplyDeleteWhat bothers me more than this is when people use 'literally' horribly wrong. Your first example with 'literally swamped' got me thinking about that, but I looked up swamped and while the first definition specifically said overwhelmed with water, the second was much more general in what can be overwhelming so I guess it is acceptable. But I've seen some very awful uses of the word.
ReplyDeletee.g. "I was literally bored to death in the class."
Then why are you talking?