I Dislike Your Favorite Team

Frequent NFL blogger (on this site--of his recent work, I particularly enjoy his take on Tony Dungy) and Novelist Andrew Wice sent me an email in which he complained about the use of the word "ironic".  Ladies and Gentlemen, there's probably not a day on this God's Green Earth that has gone by without an Andrew Wice complaint about the use of the word "ironic" since, I'll wager, 1993.  So that is nothing special.

But then he highlighted this sentence, and it almost killed me, at least in part, because the sentence wasn't coming from a 15 year old boy, logging into his Bleacher Report account for the first time.  It's coming from "Larry Weisman, an award-winning journalist during 25 years with USA TODAY".  His bio is in italics, and he's won awards, and he's been writing for a very long time.  I remember when USA Today debuted, and I'm thinking he must have been there at the beginning.  And hey, let's not pretend that the USA Today was ever looked upon as a great literary paper.  It wasn't, and isn't.  But that's beside the point.  After 25 years of writing, with a copy editor over his shoulder for at least 20 of those years (before USA Today just totally gave up) you might expect a certain level of knowledge about the English language.  Here's the sentence that sent Andrew and myself into a tailspin:

"[Rex] Ryan, literally larger than life, sets a raucous tone for his team."

Ladies and Gentlemen, What the fuck?  Haven't we been through enough misuse of the language already?  Do we all have to do David Cross style rants before this gets fixed in our culture?

Dear Larry Weisman, award winning Journalist of 25 years with USA Today--someone can not be "literally" larger than life.  The phrase "Larger than life" is a metaphorical exaggeration; just like someone can not actually be, "faster than greased lightning" or "dumber than a box of hair" or "as sharp as a sack of wet kittens".  Those are metaphors, you see.  Larry Weisman, despite your horrible misuse, you are not "literally" dumber than a box of hair, because you presumably have autonomous functions, like blinking, and breathing.  In theory, you write words.  A box of hair would not be able to do that.  So I wouldn't say that "Larry Weisman is literally dumber than a box of hair."  Because that would be fucking stupid.  I could say, however, "Man, that Larry Weisman, and his inability to use the English language that he's been using for at least four decades now..he's about as sharp as a bowling ball."

"Literally" is not short-hand for, "I know this is a phrase that gets used a lot, but I REALLY MEAN IT" as much as you might want it to be.  Literally means, "This is fact, not literary exaggeration".  When Brett Favre, last year, threw a last-second touchdown to beat the very mediocre San Francisco 49'ers, you could very easily say, "He threw a (literally) last-second touchdown."  Thus, you would separate it from touchdowns thrown with 30 seconds on the clock that are sometimes called "last-second" even though they were not, literally, last second.

This isn't hard to understand.  And I don't browbeat my 15 year old niece over her use of "literally".  But here's the thing--she knows better than to use it in such a stupid ass way.  Larry Weisman is getting paid to write; he's been paid to write for decades.  He shouldn't need help to understand this.  Next time, write what my niece would have:  "Rex Ryan is a very large, fat, loud man, who gets his team excited."  Boom.  No more shitty metaphor/literal intersection.

Larry Weisman, you literally write like an asshole.