Desipio Message Board

Saw a trailer for this when I went to see Bruno.

Megan Fox plays a homicidal teenage vampire cheerleader or something. She's Jennifer. Amanda Seyfried (Lilly from Veronica Mars) is her nerdy friend.

It looks worse than godawful—like Twilight–meets–Heathers for the Fall Out Boy generation—but i still sported a total chubby through the trailer. At one point, Megan definitely tried to get her lez on with Seyfried.

Apparently it was written by Diablo Cody of Juno fame and named after a Hole song. That's not awesome.

It does feature J.K. Simmons in a supporting role, though. So there's bound to be at least one good scene, right? Maybe they can just add him to the red-band trailer and put it on loop.

http://www.desmoinesregister.com/article/20090504/SPORTS1402/90504028/-1/NEWS04

QuoteThe Chicago Cubs are expected to activate Iowa Cub utility infielder [BOBBY SCALES] today, and this time he's even going to get a uniform.

Sure, we may be losing Z to the 15-day DL.

But think of how much we'll gain.

Arizona governor Jan Brewer is expected to issue an emergency boner alert for the greater Phoenix area sometime this afternoon.

We all recoil when someone uses the word "literally" when they mean "figuratively"... But what if they were just using "literally" figuratively... LITERALLY?

Don't look at me like that.

I've got a linguist on my side...

http://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~nunberg/CLliterally.pdf

QuoteTo judge from the number of letters and emails that I receive as chair of the American Heritage Dictionary's usage panel, no profession takes such a proprietary interest in English usage as lawyers do (software engineers come in a distant second). And the dereliction that most often annoys my legal correspondents is the use of literally to intensify the force of an idiom, as in "She literally bit my head off" or "I'm literally starving."

Lawyers aren't alone in this, of course; critics have been condemning the usage for a long time. In 1909, Ambrose Bierce commented, "It is bad enough to exaggerate, but to affirm the truth of the exaggeration is intolerable." And two decades later, H. W. Fowler excoriated the hyperbolic use of literally with a rare show of indignation: "We have come to such a pass with this word that where the truth would require us to acknowledge our exaggeration with, 'not literally, of course, but in a manner of speaking,' we do not hesitate to insert the very word that we ought to be at pains to repudiate; such false coin makes honest traffic in words impossible."

False coin it may be, but the counterfeiters are in good company. Dickens used literally loosely, and so did Thackeray (who wrote in 1847, "I literally blazed with wit"). And you can find the construction in the works of James Joyce, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Vladimir Nabokov. With such illustrious precedents to draw on, who can blame the football announcer who says "They literally hammered the quarterback into the ground"?

...

In the end, this is an eternal story of original sin and redemption. It's natural enough for us to use literally in a loose way to "affirm the truth of an exaggeration," as Bierce put it. If "I'm starving" is hyperbole, then "I'm literally starving" is simply more so. And when you think about it, the critics' objection to that use of literally is rather odd — it amounts to saying that literally is the only word in the language that can never be used in a figurative way. Even so, most of us come around once we become aware of the ridicule that we can come in for when we use literally loosely — "You don't mean you were literally floating on air?"

That's the moment when most of us get our first inkling of what literal is really supposed to mean. It can be a difficult notion to get a handle on — as linguists have been at pains to point out, our speech is shot through with dead metaphors, and the great body of them are so run-of-the-mill that we don't pay them any mind. (I count seven in the previous two sentences alone — eight if you include literal itself, which doesn't really have anything to do with letters.) Metaphor is so basic to our thought that it's impossible to tell where literality leaves off, nor is there usually any practical reason for trying to do so.

If anything, can we at least all agree that pissing off lawyers is good sport?