Really?

I support the Move Your Money movement. I agree with its premises. That the multinational banks took huge bailouts from us, United States taxpayers. That they are keeping that bailout money for themselves instead of lending it to those who need it, which is what they were supposed to do. That one highly appropriate response is to take our business elsewhere. I would do just that, except my business already was elsewhere.

But, it is difficult to resist a grammatical and conceptual smackdown. Particularly when the (linguistic) subject has almost literally been in our faces for months.

So I was listening to "interfaith voices" this morning on the radio and I almost literally jumped out of bed and did the dance of semantic rage on the bedroom floor. Maureen Fiedler was interviewing a Seventh-day Adventist minister from California about the participation of faith communities in the move your money movement. She fed him one of those straight lines (you have to imagine her opening her eyes very wide and pretending to be 15 years old) "What is the moral component of taking your money out of banks that have caused many people to lose their homes and starve to death etc.?" He referred to the parable of the unforgiving servant. A servant owes his King 10,000 talents, which is probably the modern equivalent of about a billion dollars. The king forgives him, whereupon the servant goes home and chokes his own servant who owes him a much smaller amount of money. Isn't that the way it goes! But then the guest speaker said that major banks were literally choking their customers by refusing to lend them desperately needed money. I wish they were! They might go to jail if they were literally choking people to death. Almost literally robbing almost literally millions of people so that they almost literally starve to death seems to have no punishment at all. At least if you are the kind of "person" who happens to be a very big bank and a major congressional donor.

So keep on fighting the good fight. I am almost literally right there with you. But I almost literally experienced faith healing through my reaction to your unwarranted expansion of the meaning of the word "literally." That would have been nice.