More Tics: Two Modern Intensifiers

'I've always been clear'

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. 

Instances, Incidents, Incidences

This phenomenon has slowly snowballed over many years.  It doesn't involve any notable conceptual confusion other than the milder ignorance of the relevant words, but it has further dimensions which I'll get to.  People will say, in place of (the correct) 'past instances' of some kind of event, 'past incidences' of the kind of event. 

A doctor is conferring with the family of a stroke victim under fifty:

He's a young man. He shouldn't be having such incidences! (Dark Water, Netflix)

I've heard people anxiously garble the somewhat difficult to enunciate 'in-ci-den-ces', or even to begin saying 'instances' only to 'correct' themselves with 'incidences'.  Aside from the impropriety of usage, why think the more tortuous word is the one to use, when the easier one would do, which everyone understands?  No doubt people know the term 'incidents', which denote a certain sub-class of instances.  Is this mistaken use of 'incidences' a mere mispronunciation of 'incidents', or a graver sort of mistake?  To speak properly of the incidence of a kind of event is not to speak of a particular case of the event, but to speak of its frequency, the rate at which it happens.  

It could be because I'm getting examples mostly via Radio 4, but it may have to do with the fact that it often happens when a person is trying to sound more intellectual or more official, if not more officious, than is their wont; perhaps they have some dim association of incidences with graphs, even with inflection points.  

Again, the case follows the usual pattern:  An ordinary word - 'instance' - is phonetically close to a more exotic word that is it least in the same semantic ballpark - 'incidence'.  Some person, unaware of the difference in meaning, uses the second for the first, and for some inscrutable reason, the virus proves to be catching.  

They Sadly Died

Of late, whenever a newscaster announces deaths--a car crash, coronavirus, terrorist bomb etc.--they say that people sadly died. You might think this is a courteous show of feeling, but of course since 'sadly' has become de rigueur, it is nothing of the sort; it is only a cluttering of speech.  The devil in me wants to ask, after the newscaster says thus-and-so many people sadly died of coronavirus, how many additional victims went out defiantly, angrily, or even jubilantly?  Another devil in me wants to know, exactly whose sadness are you speaking of?  The dead person's?   The deceased person's friends and family? Seems presumptuous. Your own?  Or is it impersonal, as in the 'sad fact of their dying'?  

Written journalism has also caught the bug.  Today I read: 

When officers arrived they found two infants inside the vehicle, and they were sadly pronounced dead at the scene by emergency paramedics. 

 

Entitlement

One used to say such things as 'She has a sense of entitlement'; 'She thinks that she is entitled to walk in without an appointment'; 'Yes, she is entitled to be paid that sum'; 'All members of the club are entitled to two drinks at the bar'. It is always entitlement-for, a transitive expression:  In the first example, the object is tacit, but it is understood that the subject believes she entitled to something or other, normally if not inevitably something desirable.  And, most important for the point I'm about to make, entitlement is something granted by others--by social or legal contract, or by those unspoken agreements that exist between us. 

But now people say 'She's entitled!', an apparently intransitive phenomenon, a one-place predicate, meaning a property, not a relation (for a whole book about it, see Entitled: How Male Privilege Hurts Women, by Kate Manne). What they mean, on the older way of speaking, is 'She has a sense of entitlement', or 'She assumes she is entitled (to something)'.  In fact it is possible to be entitled in the new sense without actually being entitled the old sense.  To say one is entitled in the new sense is primarily a remark about one's own state of mind.  Entitlement in the old sense, by contrast, was an achievement, a 'title' one had to earn, or be granted as a matter of one's social or legal standing.  Not only is one's state of mind not sufficient for entitlement in the old sense, no particular state of mind is necessary: one can perfectly well be entitled to something, in the old sense, without being aware of it, or indeed while believing that one is not entitled to it.  Now, contrariwise, to say 'She's entitled' is more often than not taken to mean, precisely, that she lacks the standing she thinks she has, that, in the old sense of the word, she is not entitled.  

Is any confusion generated by the potential ambiguity between the two senses?  I said above that, unlike the old sense, to say one is entitled in the new sense is primarily a remark about one's own state of mind.  Is it merely such a remark?  A bit of field work perhaps is necessary; ask subjects whether it is possible for one to be mistaken in thinking one is entitled.  I suspect results would not be uniform, a sign that echoes of the old sense are still present. 

Redundancy of 'Mights'

Redundancy of 'Mights'

Today a person in government said (of Boris J) that they're "going to conduct an inquiry to find out whether there is any evidence that malfeasance might have been committed". No, this makes me cringe a little.  That is like saying "It's possible that it's possible".  Deniers of S4 aside (and setting aside Two-Dimensionalism), that is just an overly wordy way, that is a redundant way, of saying "It's possible," or, in today's case, that they're "going to conduct an inquiry to find out whether there is any evidence that malfeasance was committed" (or - thanks DL - that they're "going to conduct an inquiry to find out whether there is any evidence of  malfeasance").  That there is evidence that something happened does not prove, of course, that the thing happened. It is just evidence. 

Why do people speak this way?  Possibly it's just a shaky grasp of grammar; one can well-imagine the speaker, her or his eyes going vacant when speaking the sentence.  But it might also be a certain humility; one can imagine the inner dialogue: "This thing is possible; that's all I want to say and don't want anyone thinking I'm saying more than that.  Better put in 'might' or 'possible' wherever I can, just to make sure".  Or maybe both are at work. 

Qualitative and Quantitative

Qualitative and Quantitative

In 1971 the UK changed its coinage system, from a system where twelve pennies make a shilling, and twenty shillings make a pound (I know very little about it, but they tell me also of tanners - not tenners - ha'pennies, half-crowns, farthings, thrupenny bit, and more), to a more sensible decimal system, like the US system, which has always been decimal (and of course the Euro).  Just as one hundred cents make a dollar, one hundred pence make a pound, and the shilling was retired. 

The people were not invariably pleased, I hear.  Among other things, this has always struck me as symptomatic of a more general phenomenon of people disliking brute numbers as a means of thinking, especially when evaluating things.  One prefers to have a remnant of barter, where your units were a pound of apples, a healthy cow at 2 years age, and so on.  As if you don't really know how much you're getting until translated into things of real value--apples, cows, or indeed, somewhat ironically, gold or silver (and this is in a sense true).  Not only does it seem colder to speak of 100 units rather than twelve or twenty etc., it's as if a pound just happened to be equivalent to twenty schillings, but it is not equal to twenty schillings, it's not the same thing; maybe tomorrow it will be worth twenty-one!

The same thing happened with the shift from the Imperial system of weights and measures--stones, pounds, inches, feet, miles--to the more orderly Metric System; fourteen pounds make a stone; twelve inches make a foot, 5280 feet make a mile, and things get very complicated when speaking of ounces, pints, quarts, gallons, etc., a complexity which is exacerbated with differences between US vs UK systems.  Although for some purposes (such as the distances on road signs), people still use the old system (in any event I don't see that there is anything psychological going on here).

In music, the British speak of semibreves, minims, crotchets, quavers, and semi-quavers.  In the US, it's a more rational, and easier to learn and memorize 'decimal' system, with whole notes, half-notes, quarter-notes, and eighth-notes (and sixteenth-notes and so on).  Again, it's as if the crotchet has an intrinsic quality that is not to be compared with that of the quaver.    

This is somehow similar to weather forecasting terminology in Britain as opposed to the US.  In the US, the forecasts convey the predictions in a scientific style; they'll speak dryly of  'an 80% chance of precipitation', 'humidity over 90%', 'Low temperature overnight of 40 degrees' (although in the relatively folksy degrees Fahrenheit).  In the UK it is more subjective and homespun in style: they'll say 'It's going to be wet out there! Galoshes all round! Rain, or even snow very likely!'; the 'Beast from the East!'; 'It will feel cold; a chilling wind lies in store for us!'; 'The sun is trying come out but I don't think it'll succeed!'; 'Bit and bobs of mist are still hanging round!' 'We're in for a stiff dose of the wet stuff!'. 'And that's your weather, Helen!'. (I could go on). 

I also hear some echo of the difference, with respect to the qualitative-quantitative distinction, in the sale of medicines.  In the US, names (and the character of the packaging) encourage you to think that you're trusting science, the latest hi-tech; in the UK, to think of your auntie, your tried and trusted home remedies.  'Corocidin', 'Nyquil' , 'Mucinex' vs 'Lemsip', 'Night Nurse' or 'Beecham's'.  The difference is however lessening, I believe.

Hypotheses?  I don't think it's that the people in the UK more likely to cling to primitive ways of thinking, or let alone that they're not mathematically as advanced as the Yanks. The 1950's and especially the 1960's made science -- the realm of mathematics -- very much the thing in the US.  Americans got very puffed up about the atom bomb, B-52s and Doomsday, lasers, scanners, sonar, radar, going to the the Moon, transistors, computers.  All, at least one was led to believe, American inventions.  It was partly genuine American pride which survived from the end of Second World War until it began to fizzle out in say the 1980's, that perhaps explains the points about Medicines and the Weather.  And the other points can perhaps be explained independently, perhaps just as accidents of history.  But maybe one needs to remark the forest here, not just the trees.  Taken together, maybe these do suggest a difference between the British and the American Character. 

Prosecute/Persecute; Invidious 

The difference between the verbs to prosecute and to persecute is showing signs of being lost.  A recent story about none other than Donald Trump, speaking of the riots in Washington DC, 6th of January 2021: 

Trump also complained that law enforcement was now “persecuting” the Capitol rioters, hundreds of whom have been arrested, while “nothing happens” to left-wing protesters.

I predict that the adjective 'invidious'--so very good in suitable spots, expressing a complicated meaning, of a distinction which will cause undue division -- will go the way of 'begging the question' or 'refute'.  It will come to mean, when said of a person such as Trump, 'too individual' or 'unduly selfish'.  Just you watch.