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 meant to illustrate how habitual this usage has become, so that even experts who know exactly what they’re saying and mean every word now mix in a healthy does of “sort of”s or “kind of”s in their otherwise confident speech. 

A similar tic was recently pointed out to me because I tend to use it.  It’s the use of “I feel like” instead of “I think.”  Is this a recent development?  I feel like it is.  Maybe you’ve noticed it too.  In situations where it would be perfectly natural to say “I think,” people instead say “I feel like.” 

“Is that paper due today?”
“I feel like it is.”

My father-in-law pointed out to me that I use this construction too often.  “You sure feel a lot,” he said.  “You’re always feeling.”  And over the couple of weeks since he mentioned this, I’ve been noticing it in all kinds of discourse. 

Let me say, here, that I don’t know anything about what I’m talking about.  This is a real, heartfelt disclaimer, not just a habitual tic.  I like to think about stuff like this, and inevitably I leap to huge-but-casual, potential conclusions, which I hold at arm's length and examine with a sense of bemusement.  I don't think I'm right about this idea.  I just have this idea, and find it interesting.

So: I wonder if these recent trends in qualifiers reflect a sense that's welling up inside us of the inadequacy of intellect?  Decisiveness is fraudulent.  It’s better to “sort of” propose things.  And thinking isn’t good enough, either.  It’s actually more accurate to say you “feel like” something.  My broad-stroke sense of intellectual history tells me that we should be waking up, eventually, to the realization that The Enlightenment notion of the solve-ability of all problems is not proving accurate.  We've had the Heisenberg uncertainty principle for almost a hundred years, but it seems not to have changed our course (though Breaking Bad has made excellent use of it).  Basically, our intellectual engineering in this world has led to some incredible advances, but as we’ve gone forward through three centuries of optimism about logos, as applied to research, development, industry, etc., we’ve struggled to control ourselves, and now we're starting to suspect that the consequences are catching up. 

As we begin to feel ourselves sliding down the back side of Mount Reason, perhaps the evidence begins to show in our little language tics.  We say “I feel like” instead of “I think,” because thinking's supposed to lead to knowing, and no one really believes in that anymore.  Knowing is like disco or ascots or powdered wigs.  So '70s.  1970s, or 18, or 17.   

See, I told you this was going to be irresponsibly over-generalized.  But I feel like there might be something to this.  Maybe not exactly this idea, but something sort of in the vicinity, maybe not in the same ballpark, but in the same kind of solar system, sort of, or maybe galaxy, or at least I feel like within the same sort of universe.


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