Languagehat.com reports on a new edition of H. W. Fowler’s A Dictionary of Modern English Usage. I have a copy of the second edition, so I can’t say if the entry below derives from Fowler or from the equally wonder­fully named Sir Ernest Gowers (who revised the text in the 1960s), but it’s a charac­ter­ist­ically dry dismantling of a certain misuse of language that I’d assumed was only a modern complaint. It seems, however, that it’s been going on for ages, figur­at­ively speaking. (Or, if it’s an addition of Gower’s, literally decades.)

literally. We have come to such a pass with this emphasizer that where the truth would require us to insert with a strong expression ‘not [literally], of course, but in a manner of speaking’, we do not hesitate to insert the very word that we ought to be at pains to repudiate […] The Prime Minister sat through the debate [literally] glued to the Treasury bench […]

I have to apologise to the student I recently mentored, who used the word in a story I was critiquing. I didn’t exactly quote the above, but I came close.

Nip it in the bud, I say. (In a manner of speaking.)

It doesn’t come as a huge surprise, but I didn’t realise Michael Moorcock was a Doctor Who fan until it was recently announced he was contrib­uting an original novel to the tie-in range currently being published by BBC Books. Here Moorcock shares his memories of the original series and his excitement (and sense of nervousness) about his forth­coming involvement with the new incarn­ation. Too bad Moorcock didn’t write for the New Adventures series Virgin published in the nineties: he could’ve really let rip. Looking forward to this one nonetheless.