True story. I hit almost that exact line in the fluffy intro to the documentation for a mobile development application, and it utterly destroyed my productivity for several minutes.
I sat there and built a whole story in my mind – this atrocity had to be a compromise of some sort. The tech writer had probably put in “literally,” somebody in a document review had probably mentioned that mobile devices could not be said to be “literally” everywhere because the review attendees weren’t currently swimming through an endless sea of Android devices, and someone had proposed the completely inane “almost literally,” which had for some ungodly reason been accepted, or more likely forced into the document by someone with a bigger office who liked the sound of the term and/or wanted to prevent me from getting any work done for a while.
Ever since, this has stuck in my brain like Lewis Black’s horse. And now I’m sharing it with you.
You’re welcome.
On a side note, this is NOT the worst attempt I’ve ever seen to excuse the misuse of “literally.” I saw a post somewhere once that misused the term as a meaningless bonus adverb and offered the unapologetic explanation “Don’t take ‘literally’ literally! LOL!!!” I sneer even now thinking about it.
-=ShoEboX=-
According to actual real life linguists, the phrase almost literally is a perfectly valid English construction.
It is a perfectly valid construction….but only for the examples he gives above.
“Meaningless bonus adverb.” Good phrase; I must remember it. We often seem to need extra words, perhaps out of a misapplied sense of rhythm. Which may also explain the proliferation of F-bombs in casual conversation.
Meagen – Thanks for the link, I was hoping the good folks at LanguageLog might have something to say about this but for some reason I didn’t bother to Google for it.
Michael – Similarly, I’ll have to remember “misapplied sense of rhythm.”
-=ShoEboX=-
wow.. ‘don’ttakel iterally literally’ hurts my bones like a bad sneeze.
The problem as I see it is that we lack a good term for ‘figuratively but fervently’..
A construct may be perfectly valid and yet be virtually useless. Or almost literally useless if you only have 499 words and you need 500.
I overheard recently “he literally ripped her head off.” My head almost literally exploded.
thought of this comic during last night’s Archer episode..
he said “my head is spinning” then in case it was misconstrued as “emotionally reeling” he added “literally” meaning “from the drugged wine”.. at which point it was pointed out that his head wasn’t LITERALLY spinning.. so we’re definitely missing a useful word from our lexicon to imply “i’m using a figure of speech but i’m not being poetic”
Ah this is like a comic and 2 minicomics, between the explanation and comments I have my share of fun.