Literally, It's Figuratively Hyperbole

There's a famous scene in the movie The Godfather, Part III where Don Michael Corleone (Al Pacino) laments not being able to operate his 'business' empire more legitimately by saying, "Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in!"

Enter this week's latest Whacked Out In The Head moment from Michele Bachmann, who had gone quite some time without making national news for saying something stupid.  Just when I thought she was out, she pulled me back in with this quote, from a speech on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives about repealing Obamacare:

"That's why we're here.  Because we're saying, let's repeal this failure before it literally kills women, kills children, kills senior citizens."

Literally?  So she believes that a law/regulation, basically words on paper, will somehow animate and act to take a life.  Either she is very stupid about what inanimate objects can do, or very stupid about the definition of the word 'literally'.  (I say both.)

Makes me wonder why extreme conservatives like her even bother with the old, "Guns don't kill people" routine.  Guns literally can kill people, but if paper can do it too, we ought not be wasting time worrying about guns!

The sad thing is, the content of Bachmann's statement is already dumb enough.  How much more time will conservatives like her waste on repealing Obamacare?  Congress passed it, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld it, and voters re-elected the president responsible for it.  But she insisted on going the extra mile to expose herself as being stupid beyond the regular dumb, and used the word 'literally' where it made no sense.

Unfortunately, the incorrect and overuse of the word 'literally' these days is almost offensive.  I frequently correct both family members and strangers on how they use it.  These days, people commonly use it to intensify what they're saying, as opposed to actually using it properly.  In other words, it's being used as hyperbole.  Literally.

So thank you, Michele Bachmann, for allowing me to write about the misuse of the English language, while at the same time ridiculing you again.  Good to have you back.  Figuratively.

You Are Not Well At Grammar

Not much time to write this week, so I'm going to pass along an excerpt from a terrific blog post I read on grammar usage by a blogger named Kyle Wiens:

If you think an apostrophe was one of the 12 disciples of Jesus, you will never work for me. If you think a semicolon is a regular colon with an identity crisis, I will not hire you. If you scatter commas into a sentence with all the discrimination of a shotgun, you might make it to the foyer before we politely escort you from the building.

Some might call my approach to grammar extreme, but I prefer Lynne Truss's more cuddly phraseology: I am a grammar "stickler." And, like Truss — author of Eats, Shoots & Leaves — I have a "zero tolerance approach" to grammar mistakes that make people look stupid.

Now, Truss and I disagree on what it means to have "zero tolerance." She thinks that people who mix up their itses "deserve to be struck by lightning, hacked up on the spot and buried in an unmarked grave," while I just think they deserve to be passed over for a job — even if they are otherwise qualified for the position.

Everyone who applies for a position my company takes a mandatory grammar test. Extenuating circumstances aside (dyslexia, English language learners, etc.), if job hopefuls can't distinguish between "to" and "too," their applications go into the bin.

Good grammar is credibility, especially on the internet. In blog posts, on Facebook statuses, in e-mails, and on company websites, your words are all you have. They are a projection of you in your physical absence. And, for better or worse, people judge you if you can't tell the difference between their, there, and they're.

On the face of it, my zero tolerance approach to grammar errors might seem a little unfair. After all, grammar has nothing to do with job performance, or creativity, or intelligence, right?

Wrong. If it takes someone more than 20 years to notice how to properly use "it's," then that's not a learning curve I'm comfortable with. So, even in this hyper-competitive market, I will pass on a great programmer who cannot write.

Grammar signifies more than just a person's ability to remember high school English. I've found that people who make fewer mistakes on a grammar test also make fewer mistakes when they are doing something completely unrelated to writing — like stocking shelves or labeling parts.

I hire people who care about those details. Applicants who don't think writing is important are likely to think lots of other (important) things also aren't important. And I guarantee that even if other companies aren't issuing grammar tests, they pay attention to sloppy mistakes on résumés. After all, sloppy is as sloppy does.

That's why I grammar test people who walk in the door looking for a job. Grammar is my litmus test. All applicants say they're detail-oriented; I just make my employees prove it.