It’s the groggy, nerve-sizzling season on the trail, and forget the attack ads and last-minute scrapping. Any candidate will attest that the epic fight now is against sleep deprivation, the gaffe-inducing monster that looms over every campaign in its final hours.
“We had 300 people outside, literally freezing to death,” Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton marveled on Tuesday before a crowd in Iowa City.
I think Senator Clinton needs to learn what the word “literally” means.
Not that I’m claiming to be any sort of wordsmith or anything.
This is actually a pretty common mistake, and you actually hear the talking heads on TV make it quite a bit. They’ll tell you that a city suffering from riots is “literally burning down,” or that heavy rains are “literally drowning people.” Those things aren’t true, but I guess putting “literally” in front of whatever figurative expression they’re using makes them sound smarter.
Or they think it does, anyway.