Wednesday 3 September 2008

Cathy Jamieson: brain literally the size of a pea

OK, maybe not literally, but I was amused by her comment today, in response to Alex Salmond's legislative plans, in which she said that the package would "literally cut the legs out from under local government." Really? That certainly conjures up an interesting image.

The acting Scottish Labour leader is not alone in her grammatical faux pas. I work as a sub-editor on local papers and it is literally stunning the number of people who use literally incorrectly.

There used to be one sports jounalist in Inverness who literally had the word literally on the brain. He literally sprinkled it throughout his copy.

One of the classics he came out with was: "The ball literally screamed into the net."

But rather more worrying was when he claimed that: "Their opponents were literally put to the sword."

1 comment:

Jeff said...

Haha, brilliant. I am very careful with my words so I'm always picking up on these wee things myself.

I literally go through everything with a fine tooth comb. ;)

There's nothing wrong with jumbling your words up from time to time but when you're vying to be First Minister of Scotland, it'd be nice to have someone eloquent. Great that we have that for now, of course.

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