Today in the NYT magazine William Safire, the cranky curmudgeon, writes about three phrases that I keep trying to use, but am never sure if I am getting them right.
1. "If you will": Not my favorite of the lot. Safire says it means "I am going to say this, and you may not like it, but that's just too bad, so here goes".
2. "So to speak": This phrase is a way to distance yourself from the trite phrase that you know is cliche but are going to use anyway. I wonder if it is somewhat interchangeable with "as they say" as in "Furonda's chances of winning ANTM are, as they say, tenuous at best"
3. "As it were": my favorite one, and best said in a British accent, if you can do it. Safire says it is a signal of something "contrary to fact" or not to be taken literally. This is still fuzzy for me. I thought of it more as a phrase indicating that we are inserting information that we can know only in hindsight. I'm having trouble coming up with a good example. "Duke's current lacrosse scandal is, as it were, a litmus test for race relations in the South". Does that work?
All the phrases fall under the category of differentialisms-- ways to make yourself sound humble or clever while actually being "smarmily pretentious". Rhetoricians call them metanoia or correctio.
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3 comments:
I think I use these phrases much more randomly - without meaning, as it were, because they really don't mean anything, so to speak.
Lately I've become fond of using "forthwith".
love it! i love that you love all those idioms.
is that what are called? idioms?
"aforementioned" is a favorite of mine but it's not really a differentialism, is it.
btw: i like the "as it were" example. good show! (another pretentious, smarmy remark)
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