Edinburgh Day 16

Back to the grind today. Well show actually. There shall be no grinding here. Instead there will just be more shows. I think after a day’s rest I’m up for doing my show all over again. It felt nice not saying all the same words yesterday and I’m oddly looking forward to doing the whole hour again today. Yesterday was a fairly uneventful day, what with it being my day off, but I did use the time wisely and go and see Keith Farnan’s show which was brilliant and Glenn Wool’s show which is now possibly the favourite show I’ve seen so far. Its really pretty awesome. Not much else to report and I need to go and join Mark Watson’s 24 Show as I was too tired to head along last night. I will probably pop in several times today and horribly regret it as I’m then super tired for tomorrow’s mammoth show day of my show, kids show and Twitter gig (for which there are still tickets). The last 24 hour show, where Mark was in Melbourne, I helped host 13 hours of the London link up venue. It was seriously good fun and I feel a bit sad to have not spent as much time on this year’s show, especially as its the last ever one. However I also know I need to sleep if I’m going to do my show and in the battle of sleep versus Mark Watson, sleep wins. I mean it’d be pretty difficult to defeat the entire concept of sleep being just one man. If Mark did defeat sleep he’d be even more tired after his 24 hour show so he probably doesn’t really want to.

I’m leaving this blog in a moment but before I do it appears the word of this year’s fringe is ‘literally’. Literally everyone I literally meet uses literally as literally ever other word. Literally. Its driving me nuts. Basically is the other one, as though people are constantly needing to dumb down whatever they are saying to tell me basically what they are talking about. And what they are talking about is literally basic. Here’s what literally means:

1 : in a literal sense or manner : actually
2 : in effect : virtually
usage Since some people take sense 2 to be the opposite of sense 1, it has been frequently criticized as a misuse. Instead, the use is pure hyperbole intended to gain emphasis, but it often appears in contexts where no additional emphasis is necessary.

So does this then mean we are to assume that when people don’t say literally before every single fucking word, that they are infact meaning that everything they say metaphorically? I am going to start responding to every sentence that does not include literally as though they are hypothetically speaking or referring in fact to something else. And when people say basically I think I will ask what the complicated version is. I have already started being as irritating to these vocab killers as they are to me. Whenever someone uses the term ‘tell me about it’, I spend a good length of time telling them all about it. They soon learn to stop. Some might say I am a word nazi. Maybe literally and basically I am.

Off to 24 hour madness. Well a few hours of it anyway.