Vice President Joe Biden used the word “literally” incorrectly a few times in his Democratic National Convention speech on Thursday, causing the hashtag #literally to explode on Twitter with jokes and mockery at the vice president’s expense.
“If you laid every ‘literally’ that Biden said last night end to end, Paul Ryan would claim he could run the length of them in under 3 hours,” an account called Fake Dispatch tweeted. Many others joked about the development of a new Biden-inspired drinking game.
In response, Obama’s campaign team promptly purchased an advertisement to link with “literally” on Twitter, the Washington Post reports. As a result, every Twitter user searching for the word “literally” would be prompted by a tweet from President Barack Obama that quotes Biden’s line “Osama bin Laden is dead, and General Motors is alive.”
And in case anyone is planning to play that drinking game, note that according to a Washington Post blog post published Friday, Biden “literally” used the word nine times during his 40-minute speech.