Kestrell

Literally – the much misused word of the moment
from The Guardian's Mind Your Language blog
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/mind-your-language/2012/jan/29/literally-a-much-misused-word

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But as Anthony Burgess once said, the poet and the pedant are as one, and grammar is glamour. So let's be poetical. Let's indulge ourselves in some glamour.

....Writers such as Bellow, Joyce and Rushdie remind us of the fundamentally comic nature of life. That's not comic as in "ha ha" comedy (there's little to laugh about in those Bellow lines), but something more essential – a mood perhaps, maybe even a quality of vision. It has to do with life's potential for adjustability and transformation; with a reality of shifting proportions, surprising angles, creative awrynesses. The comic world is above all an inclusive world. It is also opposite to the tragic view of a harsh and prohibitive world, where the literal – the objective truth – is inflexible and unassailable.
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