3 Minor Matters

1: So

A familiar part of English speech is the locution ' .. so .. that ...', as illustrated by

He was driving so fast that he had no chance to make that corner.

Or: 

She was so good at chess that no one wanted to play her.

The construct is something like: [Noun phrase] [be] so [adjectival phrase][relative clause].  This use of 'so' has it as a somewhat complicated adverb, intensifying the following adjective but also requiring a clause following the adjective ('that no one wanted to play her'). 

But now the word 'so' is often used simply as an adverb in its own right, like 'very'.  'She was so good!', etc.  It's like a comparative that has lost its object. [JL points out that this is actually very old; nevertheless I think that its popularity has increased manifold]. 

I have often indulged in it.  I feel its power.  But I fear its effectiveness will be temporary. The effect it now has depends on listeners being aware of the comparative, that they will join me in half expecting it but being indulgent if it does not in fact come. They don't really care what in particular should take the place of the comparative clause marked by 'that', as it is intimated that some comparative could be articulated, and that is enough.  Like an ellipsis.  But that awareness, that expectation, will go.  It'll just be like 'very'. 

2: Really 

(Yorkshire, Lancashire, ...?). When you've said that p—'The defendant was guilty'— but somehow not with the emphasis or panache you'd have liked, you can tack on 'really'.  As in 'p, really'.  'The defendant was guilty, really'.  Now if I'm not mistaken (a pretty big 'if', I grant), this is not just a vacuous phrase, but serves to express the speaker's being not quite at ease in speaking as they have just done.  The word literally says 'Yes, that is the right word!', but what the speaker conveys is a certain dissatisfaction, as if the speaker did not quite succeed in expressing the meaning satisfactorily. It may be compared with '... you know what I mean?'.  Or, it is as if one's turn to speak has ended too soon. I thought there was something more! ('Is that all there is? ... If that's all there is my friend..then lets keep dancing; let's break out the booze, and have a ball').

3: Rising Intonation

This is not strictly a matter of lexicography and not even strictly of grammar, but it is so distinctive and has appeared so suddenly that it's worth commenting on (to use 'so' in the old way). I reckon it's been with us for about twenty years or so in the speech of the young but it has become rampant in the general population for only about five years (correct me if I'm wrong). This is the practice of using a rising intonation—typically reserved for questions asked with the declarative form, as in 'You want the menu?'—for a genuine statement, an assertion, where the signal conveyed is normally (though not always) that the speaker is not done speaking; what follows is another declarative statement, or another declarative conjunct or disjunct preceded by 'and' or 'or'. Typically but not always again, the speaker will do this at the beginning of their turn, with the rest of their statements or clauses following the old conventional downward-tending pattern. 

In writing it happens too, that a statement is made using the normal declarative, but a question-mark is added all the same. I assume as before that the speech-act remains that of making a statement, even if the assertoric force conveyed is thereby dialed back. Unlike examples discussed in the previous paragraph, it occurs typically not at the beginning of the piece of writing, but near the end. Often it will have the modal adverb 'maybe' (or equivalent) governing the main verb.  For example the closing sentence of a comment in a thread might be, 'Maybe we ought to relax?'.  I take it that that speech-act would be of the same category if the question mark were removed. 

Another sort of example in writing:

He passed his hand over his forehead, a little wild-looking, as if he himself had suffered only a narrow escape. "I think about it every single day. I still see her face, you know, getting into that cab? Waving goodbye, so happy." (Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch, p. 215)

Of course Tartt was not writing an academic paper or a piece of journalism.  It's a case of the author trying to be realistic in her reported speech, accurate to her imaginary protagonists—who in this case are young people in the US I think around 2010 (the speaker is Goldie, a Latino working at a parking garage).    

Why has this phenomenon come about? As far as I can see, it serves two purposes.  

The first, as in the example from Donna Tartt, is the benign one that it serves as a sort of conversational check-in: I imagine the speaker simultaneously looking up at into his listener's eyes, looking for recognition at an especially fraught or emotional moment of his speech. 'You with me?', or 'You feel me?'. It encourages intimacy, connection. 

The second is somewhat more disturbing.  Again the signal is to check in, but not normally with a look that beseeches intimacy.  It signals a rather lack of confidence in what one is saying, either lexically or factually. It is not accidental that the tone is normally reserved for one of questioning. I can't help but take this development as a sign that it holds of mankind in general, or at any rate of a certain culture of English-speakers: it signals, across the age, a loss of confidence, of certainty. It's almost as if the very practice of assertion is slowly being chipped away in a minor Orwellian nightmare: Here are some words; I am not asserting them, I'm not saying they're true, I just raise them for consideration, ok? They came to mind. I'll take them back if you don't like them. 

I would say that we have here the birth of a new variety of speech-act, of force, but we already have such devices as 'Perhaps ...', or 'I suggest that ...', and so on. 

The Death of Swearing, and the Concept Concept

Not very long ago, cursing or swearing was considered a taboo of speech.  It was considered bad manners or worse.  'Fuck', 'shit' and so on were not heard on television or radio, would never be uttered in the hearing of your children, your parents, your grandparents, in the office, in public speeches, and so on.  They were reserved for shows of genuine unhinged frustration or anger, for groups of eighteen year-olds on the prowl, and so on.  But it has changed rather quickly. Now almost everywhere these words are much more likely to be let fall, to the point where their being bleeped-out on the BBC seems artificial, as protecting no one. 

My habits have not been affected, and indeed for whatever reason I almost never swear.  I bring this up because the change seems to remove swearing from its presumably rightful place in one's psychological economy.  Certain words had the effect, when uttered in the heat of the moment, of blowing off steam, precisely because, I assume, they were forbidden.  In such circumstances—say if I've hit my thumb when hammering a nail—the words do pour out. Now there are no words left with anything like that sort of pungency. There is still a little of it—one wouldn't swear in the hearing of the Queen I suppose—but we seem to be approaching a world bereft of proper swearing because the words which once had the status of swear-words no longer quite have it, and it seems impossible that new ones will take their place.  Will we suffer from no longer having the release of swearing? 

The Concept Concept.

Are concepts the meanings of words? I have always thought so—unthinkingly as a native English speaker, and then thinkingly, as a philosopher.  Not that there is anything theoretically deep going on; 'concept' is no more penetrating than the ordinary notion of the meaning of a word. One speaks of concepts rather than word-meanings primarily to transcend any reference to a particular language: the concept equality is thought to be meant by the English word 'equality', the French word 'égalité', and the Spanish word 'igualdad'.  Equipped with this word, we can speculate about early Homo Sapiens; we can ask whether they had the concept equality, freely granting of course they didn't have the English word 'equality' although with the vague assumption that he had some language or other. Indeed we could speak of the notion rather than the concept (I've always liked that word—it doesn't pretend to be more precise than it is). Anyway we could have these conversations without using the word 'concept'. If awkwardly, one can speak of the meaning of the word 'equality', meaning a certain entity to which the word bears a certain semantic relation, and of Jack, Pierre, and Juan's mental grasp of this entity, without implying that there is a language common to any two of the listed speakers. 

But some people think that speaking of concepts gets us closer to the real facts; indeed some think they are the stuff of what Fodor called the Language of Thought. Superficially, it has always struck me that that is at most an unnatural position, for it appears to imply that there are concepts corresponding to most if not all words—not only the concept duck, the concept rock, but the concept every, the concept in, the concept put, and so on (I think of an adaptation of a point by Wittgenstein: What concept is expressed by the finger?).  I suppose I know what it means to speak that way, but such is not the language of the street, and seems to amount to what we've learned from Moliere to call a dormative virtue explanation, a trumped-up vacuous explanation. For example from YouTube videos, it is clear that for example a crow can figure out how to use a stick to retrieve a treat from some complicated setup, but does this suggest that the crow grasps concepts? What is to be gained? 

More Tics: Two Modern Intensifiers

More than the average person, politicians are averse to coming off as uncertain or vague, as having only a tenuous grasp of the issues.  To combat this, the best antidote is to speak well, engagingly, and to the point—not to disappoint the audience with automatic, wooden and tired cliches.  But the latter is the effect— not merely on me I'm fairly certain—of the habit, widespread among politicians, of beginning seemingly every statement of their position on an important topic with "I've always been clear that ..''.  Sadiq Khan, for example, addressing the problem of rape and sexual harassment in London:

I've always been clear that violence against women and girls is unacceptable. (Facebook, March 21 2019). 

Indeed the effect is to sow a seed of doubt about whether what follows is a position sincerely held, as opposed to its just being politically expedient or necessary to be seen as having held (as if one could ever be less than clear about the acceptability of such violence).  True, sometimes one does need some such device, for setting off a statement, for making clear that what immediately follows is especially important, or serves as a general summing-up of the argument the details of which one is about to provide.  But the effect on the listener of this sort of repetition—of 'I've always been clear that'—is not that.  Either it is to announce, if subliminally, in a boiler-plate way as taught by media coaches, that what is to follow is not original, probably indeed a mere dreary statement of the party-line; or—more likely in Khan's case—that what is to follow is a statement on a difficult and dangerous issue, so difficult and dangerous that he must rely on a pre-conceived speech as advised by one's handlers rather than improvising in the normal manner.  The words have so to speak the form of what linguists call an 'intensifier', but have in fact a deflationary effect, of signaling that the speaker is not wholly present, is not quite speaking from the heart. 

An intensifier that is grammatically the same but has a certain ethical dimension is 'It's right that ...', viz. Theresa May:

It is right that Priti Patel​ has resigned over secret meetings in Israel (quoted in The Guardian, Nov. 8 2017).

I hear this device as expressing something ethical, so the device is not wholly vacuous like prefacing an assertion with 'It is the case that'.   Indeed in comparison with the above use of 'I've been clear ...', this device, ahem, is acceptably clear. Nevertheless I don't approve. It is first of all inflexible, wooden and unimaginative (like that mildly irritating habit of certain analytic philosophers of always expressing negation as 'It is not the case that ...').  Of all the multitudinous ways in which one might express in English one's approbation, that this should be chosen, is most disappointing. Second, there is again in this form of words a whiff of discharging of one's responsibility, of not wanting to play the prelate, as if one were reporting the outcome of some disinterested inquiry whose job is to determine moral or political standing—as in 'The white paper concluded that Priti Patel was correct to resign'.  (A nice question is whether the matter is a moral rather than political one). If I'm right about that, then changing it to 'I think it right that ...' changes the speech-act.  

A case could made that both of these phenomena should be chalked up primarily to a certain laziness of grammar.   In English we have an easy, all-purpose but tiresome way of linking one thing to another by saying 'in terms of', as in 'In terms of her drinking I was ok with it' (rather than simply 'I was ok with her drinking'); or 'Replacing the windows is difficult to justify in terms of cost' (rather than 'It is difficult to justify the cost of replacing the windows').  Or we allude to the importance of something without having to say how or why it is important, or even whether 'important' is quite the word one wants, by simply saying 'It's about x'.  For example one might stress the importance of rhythm in jazz by saying 'It's about rhythm'.  At least grammatically, 'I've been clear that ...' and 'It's right that ...' perform a similar function, in that they are always the same—placed at the beginning a sentence or clause and have no further grammatical implications—and saves one the trouble of expressing more detailed, nuanced or subtle ideas, ones that require a firmer grammatical sense.  

The effect of these is to make speech more boring.   

Going Forward, On what it means to be ill

The recent ubiquity of the phrase going forward is difficult to explain. Examples: 

Will online soap operas become more the norm going forward?

If the government changes into one less respectful of human rights then we need to know what safeguards there will be going forward.

We can erase the final two words of such sentences without loss. That is why we have the future tense. What is strange is that there is no confusion displayed by the use of 'going forward', and it is not pretentious; no one feels puffed up, clever or cool by sticking it in.  Only a false sense of command, perhaps. 

The closest like phenomenon is the use of 'actual' or 'actually'.  It does some semantic work, contrasting a modal, hypothetical, or thought-to-be case with the actual case, as in:

Such an assailant would have had to be a fast runner; we know the actual assailant had only one leg.

It serves to signal that the scope of 'would' does not include the term that follows. There is also the case where it does not have, strictly speaking, a semantic function, but it has an analogous and quite excusable pragmatic function:

This equation holds where the bodies involved are situated on a friction-less plane. Of course, there are actually no such planes. 

But bombs are unbelievable until they actually fall.

She looks young, but she's actually 50.

It's not clear who actually pulled the trigger.

Strictly you could say the same thing by erasing 'actually', but it does serve as a useful indicator to the listener, that after musing on or being misled by other scenarios, the real case is thus and so.  It's related to prefacing what you say with 'Basically, ... ', 'Now, ...', or 'Listen, ...'. 

But one can easily get what Nick Zangwill once called the 'actually' bug, putting it in to one's sentences too liberally, to the point of its being an irritating nervous tic. As in: 

When the ball actually came to me, it was so easy to actually put it past the keeper. 

Or a headline in the Sun:

A Young Woman Refugee On What it’s Actually Like to Cross the Channel!

So is 'going forward' like this degenerate use of 'actually'?  It's tempting to think so.  But it is not, as is the case with 'actually', a case of peeling away from an established and valuable use. I've no solution. 

What it means to be ill

To be ill, to an one speaking U.S. English, is to have an infection, or more generally to have some disease.  Unlike the U.S. use, the British use of 'ill' also includes, for example, having a broken leg.  It covers almost any incapacity.

But not any.  If your arm is chopped off, you don't become ill-for-life.  If you're born with a disability, you're not thereby ill.  Yet it does not mean having something temporary either; if one contracts a incurable form of cancer one is still ill (even if the cancer merely dwells within you but makes no significant difference to your life or life-span).  

It seems to me that the U.S.-use is clearer.