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.
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