Conversational Pet Hates: The Literal Meaning

ALICE LINLEY-MUNRO

No lady you didn’t literally write bullshit in your Politics exam paper because if you did the story would have been all over campus as soon as the papers reached the exams office and we would have spent the rest of the week laughing at your foolishness. Nor dear friend of mine did you literally wet yourself laughing at a joke you were told, because if you had you wouldn’t have dared tell me and would have been too busy stocking up on Tena Lady to recount the story. Man on the bus, you did not literally roll home from the pub because you were too drunk to walk normally, yes you will have been bouncing off walls all the way home but there was no literal rolling involved.

I don’t understand what the fascination is with the word but whenever I hear someone using it I want to slap them sharply across the face to make them realise how stupid they sound. Have our vocabularies shrunk so much that we are left with no other ways to express ourselves? Or are people just lazy? I’m sure there are people who have literally wet themselves laughing or literally told their boss to piss off before storming out of the office in a huff. However I will wager that those occurrences are few and far between whereas dropping the ‘L’ word into conversation is common parlance now.

It even annoys me more than people who use ‘txt spk’ or who go one step further and ‘rItE lYk DiS’ because I tend not to have dealings with people who do that. The literal zombie appears to have stolen several of my friends brains and infiltrates their conversations on a regular basis. I’d like to have a ‘Family Fortunes’ style buzzer hidden about my person so that whenever someone commits the crime of dropping the ‘L’ bomb I can stun them in to silence with a big fat ‘UHH ERRR’.

Capitalising on their stunned silence I would then gently, I promise not to use my fist, explain why they got buzzed before letting them go on their merry way safe in the knowledge that they have been schooled in the art of conversation. Read more by Alice.

My hat differs from your hat

MADDIE YORK

My biggest bugbear in language at the moment is the seeping in of the construction ‘different than’ instead of the correct ‘different from’. I think it’s an American usage, as I’ve heard it on US TV shows many times and also have a feeling my American friends say it. In UK English, it is incorrect and sounds so lazy it makes me flinch.

‘Different’ is starting to be used as though it’s a comparative word, where in fact it’s just an adjective, based on the verb ‘to differ’. So you’ll hear that something is ‘better than’ something else, which is correct, but then you’ll hear that it is ‘different than’ something else. It sounds horrible! “My hat is different from your hat” sounds so natural and neat because, of course, what I’m saying is: “My hat differs from your hat.”

I’m also grumpy about the ugly but increasingly prevalent ‘fed up of’. I actually saw this used in The Times the other day by a columnist I like and respect. It’s an expression that uses a literal concept of being fed with something to the point where you are full and feel jaded by it (picture feeling fully fed after a roast lunch) to express a figurative idea of having had enough. If you take the expression literally, you would never say: “I am fed up of roast chicken.” You would say: “I am fed up with roast chicken.” You have literally been fed with roast chicken. Roast chicken is the food with which you have been fed.

If I could convey to people who use this expression wrongly that the reason it’s a nice expression to use is precisely because of the visual imagery of being actually fed with something up to the limit, would they see that saying ‘fed up of’ is simply not doing justice to the expression? Read more by Maddie.