I love Anthony Bourdain. He makes wonderful TV programmes about food – frank and personal and often very funny. Also I discovered, entirely by chance, his legendary New York brasserie <a href="http://leshalles.net/brasserie/" target="_blank">Les Halles</a> long before anyone had heard of the guy. How an American with only distant French ancestry managed to create a restaurant so intensely Gallic is beyond me.

Bourdain writes the way he does TV – eccentrically. He has a <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2010/jun/12/anthony-bourdain-war-fast-food" target="_blank">wonderfully entertaining article in today’s Guardian</a><em></em> about how he’s trying to steer his toddler daughter away from junk food with black propaganda: whispering evil tales about Ronald McDonald and stuff. In it he declares…
<blockquote>But if you are literally serving shit to children, then I've got no problem with a jury of your peers wiring your nuts to a car battery and feeding you the accumulated sweepings of the bottom of a monkey cage. In fact, I'll hold the spoon.</blockquote>
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<em>Literally</em>. What does ‘literally’ mean? Oh come on. You know. It means <em>literally. </em>In real life. As actually happens.

Yet time and time again you’ll find this word used wrongly, as it is here, to describe something that clearly does <em>not</em> happen. If you read the rest of the article you understand that Bourdain is making the point that fast food hamburgers are made of very low quality meat. He isn’t making the clearly ludicrous charge that they are actual excrement.

So no one is ‘literally’ serving shit to children and if you take this sentence ‘literally’ it makes a very worthwhile argument sound more than a little hysterical.

This is such a very common misuse of the word that you could, I guess, argue it’s acceptable. I don’t buy that. It’s loose and ineffective writing. If Bourdain had written…
<blockquote>But if you’re serving shit to children…</blockquote>
…he’d have made his point more succinctly for me.