Me either. Just part of the long trend of diluting intense words and chasing after new ones I guess (see: awesome, incredible, epic, etc). Kinda wonder where the language will go next.. doubleplusgood?
So, yeah, while misuse of literally literally bugs the shit out of me a lot, I'm fairly tossed up about whether it's worth bugging out over. The recent surfacing of the 'poisonous/venomous' distinction smacks of pop-culture faddism and as such, is just dull and tedious.
Academics, scientists, and engineers generally understand these details (indeed, Dalton Caldwell almost certainly _does_ know the distinction, being as he was, I gather, a 'Founder/CEO of a Sequoia portfolio company'). Complicated, careful work (in nuclear physics or space launches, for instance) generally depends on this, no doubt.
But outside those domains -- in a personal blog, for instance, or when noodling catfish in the bayou, say -- splitting infinitives might be ok, or even a shibboleth. See Dave Chappelle's analysis on Inside The Actors Studio regarding speaking as a black American.
And, while I don't care to hurtle ad-hominems ad-hoc, if you _are_ going to be pedantic about the minutiae of someone else's considered work, it's possibly worth knowing that the word is 'vicinity'.
I'm vaguely aware that my writing style is somewhat dense. I try to work on that, I really do. Still, I consider yours a sort of compliment -- an obscure achievement.
Even intelligent people that know the meaning of the word will make this mistake when writing casually. The English language would be much better off if we removed the word "literally" from it. Or, I suppose, if we all just decided to accept that "literally" now means "metaphorically".
'As is often the case, though, such "abuses" have a long and esteemed history in English. The ground was not especially sticky in Little Women when Louisa May Alcott wrote that "the land literally flowed with milk and honey," nor was Tom Sawyer turning somersaults on piles of money when Twain described him as "literally rolling in wealth," [...more...] Such examples are easily come by, even in the works of the authors we are often told to emulate.'
Given the caliber of authors that have used "literally" for emphasis, I have a hard time standing behind the concept that it's even poor style. We can decide that, moving forward, we'd like to clean up English and use "literally" differently, but calling it a mistake rather than a offense to modern style is inaccurate.
REGARDLESS, I thought this was exactly the kind of thread that Hacker News hated. :|
> The financial system was becoming a pool of molten goo, possibly spreading radiation all over its vicinity?
Metaphorically, I'd say that was fairly accurate if you consider the molten goo to be defaults and the radiation to be bank malaise and bad assets; it also managed to start the same reaction in the EU, which continues to this day.
I see this usage of "literally" more as a dereference, or an unquote. I mean, it takes a dead metaphor and tries to bring it back to live. It means "hey, pay attention to this metaphor!"
If you'd say, "the financial system was melting down", that is such a stale metaphor that it might not even trigger any associations with nuclear reactors. "Literally" forces you to stop and think about molten goo and radiation.
And as such, I approve of it (although it is much preferred to use fresh metaphors than to resurrect stale ones.)
Really? The financial system was becoming a pool of molten goo, possibly spreading radiation all over its vacinity?