I Feel Like Sort of Maybe…. I don’t remember a whole lot from my limited studies in Linguistics, but I remember that linguists will sometimes study the ways that people use certain kinds of qualifiers that act as disclaimers or “hedges” in conversation. I’m not a linguist at all, but I still plan to offer an absurdly over-generalized theory about the increase in use of certain specific disclaimers or hedges. In recent years, any attentive language user has noticed the qualifier “sort of.” It's interjected into propositions made by speakers who either are or desire to appear to be thoughtfully considering other perspectives on whatever it is they’re saying. “Sort of” indicates appropriate hesitance—it’s a marker of the speaker’s non-bossy-ness: “we expected the Voyager craft to sort of encounter resistance at the edge of the solar system but it's sort of just continued forward sort of beyond our expectations.” That’s not a great example, but it’s me...