Nauseous

Name the quote:

"Look, it’s about my mother. She’s getting on now and she doesn’t have much of a life. And she doesn’t want to do anything or go anywhere and she literally hangs around the house all day. I mean, it’s very frustrating..."

"I’m sorry Doug, can we just go back a second? You said your mother literally hangs around the house. Well, I suppose it’s a pet peeve of mine but what you mean is that she figuratively 'hangs around' the house. To literally hang around the house you’d have to be a bat or spider monkey. Now, back to your problem?"

"Do you mind if we stop while I tell you my pet peeve?"

"Not at all."

"I hate it when intellectual pinheads with superiority complexes nit-pick your grammar when they come to you for help. That’s what I got a problem with!"

"I think what he means is, that is a thing with which he has a problem."

I do actually hate the way people use the word "literally" when they mean "figuratively." I was watching MasterChef the other day and a contestant said, "This is literally the beginning of my life." And it wasn't a newborn who said that.

When I was in medical school, I had an attending who was obsessed with the correct use of the word nauseated. Any time an intern or student would present a patient and say that the patient was "nauseous," he would jump all over them.

"It's nauseated," he would say. "The patient isn't nauseous, unless she's making you nauseated."

I finally looked it up and it seems like "nauseous" is one of those words that got misused so much in the English language that it's basically come to have the same meaning as "nauseated." So it really isn't incorrect to say that the patient is nauseous. And it's also a little less pretentious.

Except every time someone says a patient is nauseous, I still hear that attending yelling in my ear. I can't seem to turn it off.