1. Too Literally For Comfort

Eugene Volokh (9:17 AM, if the link doesn't work) quotes a journalist's amusingly inept use of "quite literally" to mean "figuratively". There is an even worse misuse of "literally" in Nabokov, a line I know only because Kingsley Amis once made cruel fun of it:

And with his eyes he literally scoured the corners of the cell.

I guess the poor prisoner must have removed them first. This interesting site attributes the sentence to Invitation to a Beheading, which I've never read, and supplies lots more astonishly bad metaphors from various other authors.

2. Advice for Tiros

Yesterday (10:35 AM), the same Volokh offered detailed good advice to those trying to win readers and links for their baby blogs. The Truth Laid Bear and God of the Machine have added more, including the essential point that comments on other blogs are very helpful. 'E. Nough' was already well-known for his excellent comments on Little Green Footballs and elsewhere long before he started Thinking Meat.

Most of what I have to say about getting linked was written up a year and a day before Volokh and posted here: it's mostly common sense, and overlaps with everyone else's advice in various ways. A few (probably very few) of my blog-readers may also be amused or instructed by my advice on how to get an academic paper on classical literature published in a scholarly journal.