How does a bullet or knife kill somebody?
If Cecil is so smart, how come he doesn’t know what literally means, or does he think that bullets really turn your insides into beef patties with lettuce and onions in a sesame seed bun?
From www.dictionary.com :
Usually beef, but not always.
The incorrect use of the word “literally” drives me crazy too (but not literally). Of course, I have been guilty of mis-using the word, but I do try to be careful. I also can’t stand it when people say “irregardless” instead of “regardless” or “de-thaw” instead of “thaw.”
The incorrect use of the word “literally” drives me crazy too (but not literally). Of course, I have been guilty of mis-using the word, but I do try to be careful. I also can’t stand it when people say “irregardless” instead of “regardless” or “de-thaw” instead of “thaw.”
Some people misunderestimate how annoying it can be.
“misunderestimate”? Is that the same as “overestimating”? Or am I making a double-negative where one doesn’t exist?
No, I think Peter M. was enhumorizing the disunderstanding of overfaultly emwording.
It’s a Bushism.
Like Dravin said, he’s not misusing it in this context. A bullet from an M-16 turns the area it hits into so much ground meat, or hamburger. People hamburger, but hamburger none the less.
<Miss Hoover>It’s a perfectly cromulent word.</Miss Hoover>
Even if we grant that “hamgurger” can be applied to meats other than beef, and that any dead body, even human, constitutes “meat”, there’s still the issue of whether a bullet truly “grounds”.
Ok then… ‘ground’… past tense of ‘grind’. I guess we can ignore the definition related to gyrating hips? That leaves, and I’m paraphrasing from the online M/W here:
to reduce to powder or small fragments, or to wear down, polish, or sharpen, or to pulverize, polish, or sharpen, BY FRICTION. It includes the word friction in all the above cases.
Hmm… he distinctly mentioned the action of fluids. Hydrostatic shock, not friction. Rules out this (these) definitions.
Some more-abstract verbs, as in ground down her spirit or he’s grinding for a test. Pretty sure that’s not talking about hamburger.
To press together with rotating motion? “Grind the teeth”? Nope, that’s not it. Although rifle bullets do rotate, don’t they? Hmmm…
To operate or produce by turning a crank? The traditional meaning of “GROUND” beef here… ‘to grind a hand organ’ is the example in the dictionary. Do bullets have cranks? Ok, so this isn’t the definition he meant either…
To move with difficulty or friction especially so as to make a grating noise <gears grinding>. That one is verbatim from the dictionary… Noisy bullets? There’s a bang, then a splat… naw, I’m gonna have to think this still isn’t what he meant.
That leaves one definition: To rub or press harshly <Ground the cigarette out>. Again verbatim. Well… I guess a bullet, at speeds high enough to produce the aforementioned hydrostatic shock, would be pressing rather harshly upon the victim’s skin… so this must be it!
What Cecil said was “…reducing the region of impact literally to HARSHLY PRESSED MEAT OR MEAT BYPRODUCTS”
I think Dictionary is a little off. Hamburger is always beef. If it’s something else then it’s blank-burger. Like if it’s turkey, then it’s turkey-burger. Of course then you have to wonder what one would call ground ham…
I don’t know about that, tbg. A hamburger is called a hamburger because it originally came from Hamburg, Germany, no? It has nothing necessarily to do with ham (as you said), so why is it necessarily beef? I think words like “turkey-burger” and “ostrich-burger” are just marketing health-food-babble for those who associate hamburgers with artery-clogging red meat. The proper term would probably be “turkey hamburger” or something like that. Likewise, there’s nothing inherently incorrect about saying that ground human flesh could be considered “human hamburger”. Of course, I don’t plan on bringing that to my next picnic… Blech!
Since hamburger is so-called because of its origin city, I propose that a ground-ham patty would be called:
(a) spamburger, or
(b) Hollywooder
…given that Hollywood is the home of some of the greatest hams in the world.
How about “manburger”?
(I suspect this term is not safe to Google at work.)
The misuse of literally threatens to literally ruin my life.
Hamburger when used to refer to anything else besides beef is a metaphor in and of itself. Therefore, to use the qualifier “literally” would indicate that the writer means actual ground beef.
But I see this thread is already dead.
I disagree. One could use the word hamburger as a metaphor to describe something that has been smashed or pulverized (or put into a bun and consumed – my daughter used to routinely ask for peanut butter hamburgers, peanut butter on a hamburger bun), but if the word is being used to describe meat, it is fair to call that a literal use.
And the thread was only figuratively dead.
Phnord Prephect, your rejection of grinding by friction is in error. The hydrostatic comment Cecil makes is after the hamburger comment, connected by an “also”. Thus the hydrostatic shock occurs in addition to the grinding to hamburger.
The bullet impact makes flayed meat of the tissue it hits. “Hamburger” is in one context a synonym for ground meat. I think literally is acceptable in this case.