A blog post... literally.
I saw a commercial. Some sports-related man said that he had been previously "larger than life." Then they showed a picture of his former self, he weighed a good deal more in that image than his more temporally current self. Then he added, with the knowing smile that only a man possessed of a powerful and otherworldly wit can produce, "literally."
What he meant by this apparently, was that he'd concocted a bit of word play. Word play so subtle that we needed to be pointed in the right direction to recognize its presence at all. Standing there, facing in his clever words' direction, I could only die a little bit more inside.
The "clever" word play simply shifted the meaning of the term from its more traditional meaning of famous, powerful, more important than your average plebe, to a lesser interpretation meaning fat. Neither of which is literal. The literal meaning of "larger than life" is not really definable at all, being that life comes in all shapes and sizes, the definition of "life" being myriad anyway.
This might seem like I'm nitpicking. I'm not. This is fucking basic. Either the people writing TV spots don't know the difference, or they know that it doesn't actually matter. This leads to innocent victims confusing the meanings, which often leads them to look like morons when interviewed for a puff piece by their local media at the zoo when a new fucking panda has managed actually to produce offspring, for example.
I guess what I'm saying is, fuck pandas.
What he meant by this apparently, was that he'd concocted a bit of word play. Word play so subtle that we needed to be pointed in the right direction to recognize its presence at all. Standing there, facing in his clever words' direction, I could only die a little bit more inside.
The "clever" word play simply shifted the meaning of the term from its more traditional meaning of famous, powerful, more important than your average plebe, to a lesser interpretation meaning fat. Neither of which is literal. The literal meaning of "larger than life" is not really definable at all, being that life comes in all shapes and sizes, the definition of "life" being myriad anyway.
This might seem like I'm nitpicking. I'm not. This is fucking basic. Either the people writing TV spots don't know the difference, or they know that it doesn't actually matter. This leads to innocent victims confusing the meanings, which often leads them to look like morons when interviewed for a puff piece by their local media at the zoo when a new fucking panda has managed actually to produce offspring, for example.
I guess what I'm saying is, fuck pandas.