U
Unknown
Guest
nerd time: if you look at the frequency distribution of english adjectives, you see a cool interaction between relative frequency and whether the adjective is written or spoken. the realtive frequency of less common adjectives is far higher in written text.
what's more, across the whole language, the lower the frequency of a noun, the higher the probability is that it will be preceded by an adjective (or two). which means that, probabilistically, "surgeon" is way more likely to be preceded by an adjective than "man," even though it has a far 'more precise' meaning.
the not obvious (but likely correct) explanation for this is that adjectives don't work quite like we think they do, and that one of their main functions is to help make nouns more predictable (there are lots of nouns - and their number is constantly growing - so we need all the help we can get). needless to say, language that is more predictable is easier to understand, and unfortunately, along with the gold, the hot chicks and the sacred cows, the vikings also stole our gender system, which means we don't get all those little pointers that our germanic cousins enjoy.
this probably explains why, across the whole interweb, the nouns most likely to follow "cute little" are "puppy," "baby," and "kitten." it doesn't matter that every puppy, kitten and baby ever born is to some extent cute and little, because it turns out the way we use adjectives is more subtle than we suppose, which gets us to "literally."
if you look at the historical distribution of "literally", its growth starts around the time printing was invented, after which it really took off. and it is used far more in speech than text, most often to indicate that something less predictable is gonna happen. the kind of fancy shit that is more usually written than spoken, like, y'know, "literally exploded with rage."
predictability in speech and text are different (unless we're on the phone, speech is more liberallly laden with cues, making shit more predictable = less need for all the hand holding that low frequency adjectives provide in text). but, on the other hand, we can't go back and reread speech, we can only ask, "what?"
all of which means that it's highly likely that the 'correct' way of describing literary peavers is not to say that they are talking out of their asses, or that listening to them is analogous to watching a monkey licking its own balls, but that they are literally talking out of their asses, etc.
especially in speech.
fb.
ps. otherwise, kudos! great zinger.