All 10 Uses
literally
in
Blink, by Malcolm Gladwell
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- The interceptors had such a good handle on the transmitting characteristics of the German radio operators that they could literally follow them around Europe—wherever they were.
Chpt 1literally = an intensifier (to intensify what is said)
- "For a while it got so bad that I got scared," Braden says. "It literally scared me." [referring to instinctively predicting 16 of 17 double faults at a tennis tournament]
Chpt 2literally = actually (not figuratively; not an exaggeration)
- He literally goes into a spasm, and it's this early warning sign.
Chpt 2
- As Timothy Judge, one of the authors of the height-salary study, points out: "If you take this over the course of a 30-year career and compound it, we're talking about a tall person enjoying literally hundreds of thousands of dollars of earnings advantage."
Chpt 3
- In improv, the suggestion is rarely taken literally, and in this case, Jessica, the actress who began the action, said later that the thing that came to mind when she heard the word "robots" was emotional detachment and the way technology affects relationships.
Chpt 4
- "He sang for me, literally, like this"—and here Kallman gestures with his hand to indicate a space of no more than two feet—"face-to-face."
Chpt 5
- They [people with autism] have difficulty interpreting nonverbal cues, such as gestures and facial expressions or ... or drawing understanding from anything other than the literal meaning of words.
Chpt 6 *literal = most basic (not metaphorical or figurative)
- In anything less than a perfectly literal environment, the autistic person is lost.
Chpt 6literal = actual (not figurative)
- Normal people, when they were looking at the faces, used a part of their brain called the fusiform gyrus, which is an incredibly sophisticated piece of brain software that allows us to distinguish among the literally thousands of faces that we know.
Chpt 6 *literally = an intensifier (to intensify what is said)
- What that means for Hector is that in this case he needs to look pretty literal.†
Chpt 5
Definitions:
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(1)
(literally as in: literally--not figuratively) actually true using the basic meaning of the words (not an exaggeration, metaphor, or other type of figurative speech)
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(2)
(literally as in: literally at death's door) an intensifier (to intensify what is said -- especially a metaphor)Since literally can mean actually true, but can also be used to intensify a metaphor, the reader has to use context to know what the word means.
For example, if you read "She stabbed him in the back," you would probably assume she betrayed him. But if you read it in a murder mystery where the victim was stabbed, you might assume you were being told that she actually stabbed him.
Because confusion can arise from this kind of usage, many authorities discourage using literally to intensify a metaphor--especially in formal usage. -
(3)
(literal as in: a literal translation) word for word
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(4)
(meaning too rare to warrant focus) Less common and more specific meanings of literal include:
- an earlier or original meaning of a word -- as in "In Japanese the literal meaning of ronin was a 'samurai without a master,' but it is now used to describe a student who did not pass the entrance exam and is without a school."
- lacking imagination -- as in "She has a literal mind."
- a fixed or hard-coded value in a computer program -- as in "Find every instance of the literal in the source code."
- related to letters -- as in "In algebra we use literal notation as when 'x' represents a value."