I know it isn’t nice to pick on people about grammar when they are speaking without teleprompters and notes, but some offenses are hard to let slide. I previously poked fun at Mitt Romney for his repeated failings during a Republican forum, but now it’s Senator Joe Biden’s turn to raise the hair on the back of my neck.

I often hear people refer to something as being literally some metaphor-or-other. I understand that they are just trying to draw dramatic attention to a metaphor, that they meant figuratively, and that if they had a chance to write the same statement down they probably would have gotten it right. Senator Biden just couldn’t stop himself:

As we try desperately with a bare majority in the United States Congress to alter the course this president has set us on, a course that not figuratively [but] literally has us careening off the tracks internationally and domestically, there is one great big boulder that sits in the middle of the road: it’s Iraq.

What a travesty of a statement. What butchery of the language. In these days when the sitting President of the United States sounds like a nincompoop on a regular basis, we’re in danger of becoming numb to these kinds of shenanigans. Let’s tear this statement apart a little, shall we?
Continue reading →