Wednesday, July 22, 2009

207) Saying "Literally" When You Actually Mean "Not Literally"

Take, for instance, this claim about Sarah Palin by her spokeswoman Meg Stapleton, that "the world is literally her oyster!"


(Advisory message: in order to sheild your brain cells from trauma-related induced mercy-suicide, you can skip to the 3:30 mark for the comment in question)

It's worth noting that Sarah Palin and many of her loyal followers
already have some inaccurate beliefs about the world, notably that it's roughly 6000 years old and that it was created over the course of 24 hours by a morally ambiguous superbeing with strikingly similar attributes to those of Fantastic Four nemesis Galactus, it is nonetheless a demonstrable fact that "the world" (defined as "the earth or globe, considered as a planet") is not literally the same thing as "Sarah Palin's oyster" (defined as "any of several edible, marine, bivalve mollusks of the family Ostreidae, having an irregularly shaped shell, occurring on the bottom or adhering to rocks or other objects in shallow water belonging to the allegedly corrupt former governor of Alaska")

The error here might be easier to understand through illustration:




Special thanks to Mark Russell

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