There’s a trend, I’ve noticed, for English-speakers to create increasingly noncommittal sentences. I’ve caught myself uttering these words, and recently have tried to excise them as much as possible. Things like: “that’s really kind of…” or “that’s very sort of…”.
It seems that for fear of insulting their peers, people are diluting their thoughts with these expressions. This becomes quite dulling as people begin to chain such expressions together creating passionless and oxymoronic sentences.
Eddie Izzard touched on this idea when discussing the word “awesome”. Don’t we want these words to keep their power?
10:03 PM | Tags: english, language, vocabulary, humor