“We basically needed four stunt cops to literally run in and catch them.”?

Not “Besides myself.”

Irregardless: yes. A funny piece about an all-too-real phenomena. (Doo-doo dah-doo-doo.)

(Just kidding, thanks for the correction. But you’re normally such a careful writer, I can’t resist the chance to catch you out with two such… dare I say, common? … errors.)

Metaphor is nice, too, but be original!

But I can’t spell. Or, to be more accurate, I have great difficulty with spelling. So I can’t advise anyone about writing!

Is that why he used the word irregardless, too? ( :-p that’s my word peeve)

The use of “disconnect” as a noun I threw in as a lagniappe. (The spread of this horrid nounification is the highest crime and misdemeanor of which Clinton was–and is–guilty, to my mind. –Well, that, and the Defense of Marriage Act. Oh, and welfare reform.)

Oh, and the Iraq sanctions.

I think that in this sentence, the word “literally” is being used figuratively. You shouldn’t take it literally.

I don’t think that there is any real ambiguity when someone says “He literally bit my head off” or whatever. It only becomes a problem if someone really did bite my head off. Then I would have a hard time convincing anyone that I wasn’t just being metaphorical.

I once attended a seminar where everyone was requested to vent their pet peeves. I - of course - mentioned “basically”.

Immediately after, the clueless woman at the next table began with “well, basically…” (no, she was not trying to be ironic). There were numerous smirks and stifled laughs.

Fortunately, this one seems to be falling out of fashion, so basically, I might have one less thing to make my blood boil…

Every time I find myself using that phrase, I think of that sketch. I usually stop and say, “Sorry, I seem to have joined the British ‘Well, Basically’ Club.”

“Near miss,” after all, is a case in which “near” is used as an adjective modifying the “miss,” and not some sort of bastardized contraction of “nearly a miss”; it’s “near” as in “nearby,” as in a location in space, and not “near” as in “almost.” As for Amp’s bugaboo re: “literally,” well. If one can’t appreciate the sly humor in hyperbolizing that particular adverb, one has a stick lodged somewhere in the general vicinity of one’s fundament. –All of which is fine for pedantry, and dandy; in fact, it’s a requirement. But let’s all admit to the game being played.

Confusing “phase” and “faze,” though? Instant blackballing, in my book. Misplacing apostrophes? Grounds for termination with extreme prejudice. These are matters of an altogether different (and vastly more important) order.