WHICH SORT OF PRECLUDES GOOD MANNERS:

I hate to tell you: Phrases that announces ‘I’m lying‘ (Erin McKean, November 14, 2010, Boston Globe)

These contrary-to-fact phrases have been dubbed (by the Twitter user GrammarHulk and others) “but-heads,” because they’re at the head of the sentence, and usually followed by but. They’ve also been dubbed “false fronts,” “wishwashers,” and, less cutely, “lying qualifiers.”

The point of a but-head is to preemptively deny a charge that has yet to be made, with a kind of “best offense is a good defense” strategy. This technique has a distinguished relative in classical rhetoric: the device of procatalepsis, in which the speaker brings up and immediately refutes the anticipated objections of his or her hearer. When someone says “I’m not trying to hurt your feelings, but...” they are maneuvering to keep you from saying “I don’t believe you — you’re just trying to hurt my feelings.”

Once you start looking for these but-heads, you see them everywhere, and you see how much they reveal about the speaker. When someone says “It’s not about the money, but...”, it’s almost always about the money. If you hear “It really doesn’t matter to me, but...”, odds are it does matter, and quite a bit. Someone who begins a sentence with “Confidentially” is nearly always betraying a confidence; someone who starts out “Frankly,” or “Honestly,” “To be (completely) honest with you,” or “Let me give it to you straight” brings to mind Ralph Waldo Emerson’s quip: “The louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons.”

“No offense, but...” and “Don’t take this the wrong way, but...” are both warning flags, guaranteed to precede statements that are offensive, insulting, or both. “I don’t mean to be rude, but...” invariably signals the advent of breathtaking, blatant, write-in-to-Miss-Manners-style rudeness. (And when someone starts out by saying “Promise me you won’t get mad, but...” you might as well go ahead and start getting mad.)

So if a friend is making a mistake, has a bad habit, etc. and you'd rather not be the one to tell them but feel compelled to because of the friendship, should you skip the qualifier?

Posted by Orrin Judd at November 16, 2010 5:41 AM