The Perfect Lesson On the Correct Usage of 'Literally' and 'Figuratively'

I love Joe Biden, and I'm obviously going to vote for him and Kamala Harris exactly one month from now on November 3rd, but Joe does have a linguistic glitch that has figuratively driven me crazy at times, his constant use and misuse of the word 'literally.' (Full disclosure: I spent part of my early working years copyediting and checking the copyediting of books and I have a number of grammatical pet peeves, of which this is only one.)

First some video examples of Joe using his favorite word:

Now here is the perfect lesson in a single sentence to help Joe remember the difference, based on the largest events currently dominating the news: I don't literally want to see Trump buried because of COVID-19, but I figuratively want to see Trump buried under the largest landslide in American history.

Commas for Dummies (and Stable Geniuses)

Criticizing the grammar in the tweets of the current White House occupant seems like swinging at the lowest of low-hanging fruit, but there are Americans reading his misspealings and random CapitalizatIons and thinking they are normal. Many adults can laugh off his constant abuse of the language, but think of those who look toward him as "a very smart person," and think, God forbid, of the children who might be reading his tweets and repeating his grammatical examples in their school assignments. 

Today the topic is commas because of two howling errors in recent tweets (and I'm making an effort to not look at all of his 280-character presidential pronouncements, so these are two found at random). 

This morning came the "Just call me Kate" tweet:

Some things just don’t get any crazier. Just call me Kate, problem over! https://t.co/86SCqZ05ZG

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 2, 2020

And two days ago he tweeted about his son, Donald, [sic] and his "important new book":

My son, Donald, just wrote a really important new book, “Liberal Privilege”, talking, with great knowledge, of our world today. Lets make him a number one bestseller, again! @DonaldJTrumpJr @seanhannity

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 1, 2020

The error in first tweet should be obvious. He is asking all of us to call him Kate. If he were asking someone named Kate to call him, he should have included a comma before her name to show that she is the one being addressed. But wouldn't it be wonderful if simply calling him Kate would solve all our problems?

The error in the second tweet is more interesting. The president might have to go back and study the rules about appositives, but by placing commas around "Donald," he is clearly suggesting that he only has one son. Is this actually an error, or is the stable grammatical genius subtly trying to tell us something about the paternity of Eric and Barron?

Your use of commas suggests that you have only one son.

Hire a copyeditor (unless this is your subtle way of telling us that Gary Busey really is Eric's father).

— True Blue Liberal - #BidenHarris2020 (@TrueBlueLiberal) September 1, 2020

Sorry Chuck, but your'e [sic] wrong.

There are certain grammatical tics by which our right-wing brethren reveal themselves on social media, but you have to give @realDonaldTrump's fellow game show host turned conservative twitterer @ChuckWoolery some credit for making an effort to understand the difference between the contraction for "you are" and the second-person possessive adjective. In the slightly incoherent pinned tweet on his Twitter page, which he wrote almost a year ago, he did get all the correct letters of the contraction in the correct order, but he had a little bit of trouble with the placement of the apostrophe.

Screen grabbed on February 15, 2017 at 10:30am EST.

Good try Chuck. It's almost English!

You will know them by their elementary-school spelling grades.

I had a philosophy professor in college who told us that she would stop reading our blue-book exams and fail us if she ran across a single instance of the name "Nietzsche" spelled incorrectly. Shouldn't we hold those self-appointed constitutional scholars and members of #YallQaeda who are currently occupying federal property in Oregon -- but don't seem to be able to spell either "Tyrannical" or "Government" correctly on their printed signs -- to the same high standards?

This screen grab of @Ammon_Bundy's Twitter page was captured at noon (EST) on January 4, 2016.

Although maybe we should give these terrorist members of Vanilla ISIS a pass. Maybe their word processor simply ran short of the lower-case letter 'n'.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
UPDATE 1/7/2016: It has been discovered that this @Ammon_Bundy page is a hoax, but the "tyranical goverment" sign is real, so I'll leave this post here.

Exclamation Points!!

Here's a quick piece of friendly video advice from Mr. Lippman of Pendant Publishing to the Twitter personality known as @realDonaldTrump...

Some free campaign advice for John Ellis "JEB!" Bush...

... from Mr. Lippman of Pendant Publishing: "Get rid of the exclamation points. I hate exclamation points."

The Patron Saint of the Tea Party

As the lemmings with suicide vests are in the process of flying off the cliff in this third week of the GOP shutdown, it's important to look back at the forerunners of those who are currently waving Confederate flags in front of a black family's house in Washington DC. Specifically, we can't help thinking of March 23, 2003 every time we see the word socialist spelled "scholiast", or fields of waving yellow snake teabag flags, or a tricorner hat festooned with teabags.

On March 23, 2003, in the midst of nationwide demonstrations against the Iraq War, one unnamed flag-bandanna-bedecked Urteabagger and future meme confronted hundreds of antiwar protesters outside a Boeing missile factory and gave us the creatively-spelled sign that would launch thousands of imitators as soon as Barack Obama was inaugurated.

From a Google image search on the word "Morans"

Mr. Get-A-Brain!-Morans deserves to be the Patron Saint, or at least the Unknown Soldier, of the modern Tea Party.

Today's "Real Fact" & Giving Conservatives Credit Where Credit Is Due

First of all, I "love" the fact that Snapple gives itself full deniability by placing "Real Fact" and "Real Facts" within quotation marks. Yes, they seem to be saying, these "Facts" may be exactly as "Real" as Donald Trump's "University" or "hair". But given that this "Fact" #786 might actually be bullshit, I found it interesting to imagine the human brain using the same amount of power as a 10-watt bulb.  I assume that's a rough average, but I think we can probably be pretty sure that the most conservative among us are conserving energy (or hoarding it in their beer bellies) by using only 5 watts or less in their crania.

So, I'm giving credit where credit is due. Thank you to all the teabaggers and dittoheads out there doing their best to conserve brain power (even as they follow Michele Bachmann's advice and cling bitterly to their wasteful incandescents to light their homes).

WARNING! Don't comment unless your politics and your grammar are correct (ever noticed that liberals have better language skills?)

You are a GRAMMAR GOD!


Congratulations! If your mission in life
is not already to preserve the English tongue,
it should be. You can smell a grammatical
inaccuracy from fifty yards. Your speech is
revered by the underlings, though some may
blaspheme and call you a snob. They're just
jealous. Go out there and change the world.

How grammatically correct are you? (Revised with answer key)
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