Rhetorical Backoffs

Hello, welcome to A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Eric Johns. I’m calling from Fairbanks, Alaska.

Hi, Eric. Welcome to the show.

Hello, Eric. How can we help you?

Well, I have a question about an expression I feel like I’m hearing more and more, or is kind of finding its way into everyday use. It’s the expression, I’m just saying. It kind of feels like I’m hearing it when maybe someone is having kind of a gentle debate or a friendly sparring match, and it seems to be a way that somebody kind of holds up their hands to say, well, I just want to express myself, but don’t judge or critique my comment.

Yes. Where are you hearing this?

Well, I would say I hear it in my own family quite a lot, and just to think being more attentive to it in my family, I hear it more outside of that as well. So it seems to be becoming pretty prevalent. And again, I think just in the friendly kind of sparring and banter between friends when you debate an issue, you know, maybe the sentiment would be something like, I’m just saying don’t drive so fast. But in fact, I find it to be kind of an unfinished thought and rather it’s become sort of a way to soften or maybe blunt one’s comments.

Yeah, Eric, I was going to ask if it felt disingenuous at all.

A little bit, because on the one hand, they’re making a statement, and then on the other hand, they’re saying, but you don’t really have the right to critique it or weigh it or whatever. So I want to say what I want to say, but don’t interact with it too harshly. You know what I mean?

Right, right. They’re kind of beating a hasty retreat.

Yeah. Lobbing something and then running back behind something else. It’s a bit of a dodge or a bit of a weaselly.

Yeah, it’s like a verbal emoji or something, you know, just a little tag onto the end of it.

Yeah, what would that look like? I wonder what that would look like.

There’s a word for this in linguistics. It’s not that common, but rhetorical back-off is what you’ve just described, where you literally back off of what you’ve just said.

Yes, that’s it. Okay. And you’re disavowing it. Often it is about trying to avoid the consequences of having an unpopular opinion, where you pretend that you’re just presenting unbiased fact. But what’s really happening, your presentation of the fact is in itself a statement of opinion.

Right. It has meaning.

Yeah. It does. You’re asserting something, and you’re going to the point of saying it so others can hear it. But again, if they’re unwilling to accept it sort of carte blanche, then it is a back-off.

What did you call that again?

The rhetorical back-off, yeah. And if you Google that phrase, you’ll find some academic papers on it. And if you Google even deeper, you’ll find that linguists have been discussing, I’m just saying, in similar expressions since at least the early 2000s, and the expression is kind of an almost contagious catchphrase, has been around longer than that, a kind of thing where once somebody around you says it enough, you kind of pick up the habit yourself.

That’s why I want to be careful to say it’s not always about dodging the consequences of your words. Sometimes it’s just a tag that you throw onto a sentence without any real meaning.

I’ve noticed with my son or with some of his friends, and he’s a teenager, he’s 16, I’ve even heard it doubled up here recently where somebody said, I’m not saying, I’m just saying.

Yes. I actually have recorded citations for that. It’s a parallel to sorry, not sorry. There’s a few of these going around where you’re saying one thing and immediately denying the thing that you just said and kind of expressing your ambivalence, but at the same time trying to get away with something.

Yes. I find it frustrating.

There are others, present company excluded. Not to be critical, but… Or no offense. Like you say something offensive and you say no offense.

Yeah. So sometimes we’ll make the qualifier on the front end of our comment. This is one that seems to be more often made on the back end to sort of, again, potentially get away from, again, the consequences of what we might have said.

Well, Eric, now you have me wondering what the emoji would look like for that. Maybe somebody with their hands out in front of them or something.

I’m not sure.

I think it’s somebody running away from their words, a running emoji. I envision that posture of somebody when they make that statement. They kind of hold their hands up, palms up, almost in apologetic fashion. It’s an insincere apology or whatever.

Yeah, that could be a whole other show right there. What’s the emoji for this expression?

Yeah, exactly. We’ll have to talk to the people that Unicode or make our own submission to the Unicode for an emoji.

What?

Yeah. Away with emojis now.

Eric, thank you for your call. We really appreciate it. It was great chatting with you.

You too. Take care.

Thanks, Eric.

Bye-bye.

You bet.

Bye-bye.

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