That’s a Great Question

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Jerry Hendershot.

Hi, Jerry, where are you calling from?

I’m calling from University Park, Maryland, a D.C. suburb.

All right, well, welcome to the show. How can we help?

Well, I was a longtime worker for the federal government, and before that with an academic career.

And I retired in about 2000, and so I attended a lot of meetings over those years.

In the late 1990s, shortly before my retirement, I remember going to one of those meetings where a presentation was made, and then there was a question-answer session following that.

And the speaker, who was a new acquaintance of mine, when somebody asked the first question, said, that’s a great question.

And he continued to give that response to questions that were asked to him subsequently in that meeting.

And that was something that I hadn’t encountered before.

And since then, it’s become very common.

I hardly hear a public interview anymore that doesn’t have the interviewee using that expression and responding to questions.

It kind of annoyed me and continues to annoy me.

My question was, where did this practice get started?

How did it grow?

Why is it used so widely now?

And is it your feeling that it’s insincere when people use it?

That’s my suspicion.

That’s why it annoys me.

It seems to be a way that speakers use to ingratiate themselves to their audience and thereby deflect any difficult questions that might be put to them.

Yeah, I suspect that I am really guilty of this, but I think that a lot of questions are great.

I mean, for me, it’s like choosing a favorite star or something or choosing a favorite word.

Maybe it would help if I would find different ways to say the same thing.

Right.

I think I use that as a crutch.

Jerry, I would agree that I think it is incredibly common.

It’s one of those mini, there’s a huge list of these things that kind of get passed along.

They’re almost like infections where we all take them on and begin to say them.

And they’re kind of the glue between what we really mean to say and a natural part of discourse as well.

I wouldn’t say that it calls into question anything that the speaker has to say when they say that’s a great question.

But I think what I have seen is that sometimes they mean that the answer is difficult to come by.

So if you say something that’s really difficult, like, you know, how many grains of sand are there on Earth?

And be like, that’s a great question.

Great meaning magnitude.

Yeah, and the other one is, it’s when they’re especially prepared to answer your question.

I hear this a lot, where an interviewer, particularly a book author who knows their topic incredibly well, the interviewer will say, what do you think he was doing in 1872 when he was on vacation with his family?

And the guest will say, that’s a great question, and then it will tell them exactly what they had for lunch.

And so both of these are a kind of affirmation that you did the right thing.

And that’s an important part of any kind of discourse, where you provide a little bit of lubrication to the conversation so it doesn’t stop dead.

I hear what you’re saying, and I can agree with all that you say.

But my having lived through a transition from a time when that phrase was not used to a time when it’s ubiquitous, were there similar terms in use before that, which I just no longer remember, or were so common to me that I didn’t notice them?

What happened at around the end of the last century that people started using this so frequently?

Well, I don’t doubt that you were there and noticed it more, but it happened a lot earlier than you think it did.

At least by 1975, using that’s a great question was already well entrenched.

There’s an interesting interview by Tom Shales in the Washington Post where he’s talking to a filmmaker who’s made one of the first films about what it’s like to be a homosexual.

And there’s a point in the interview where Shales asks the guest, the filmmaker, he says, how far have homosexuals come in bettering their lot in society?

And the guest says, that’s a great question.

And then Shales notes, but as he does for most questions, he has no great answer.

It is literally what you’re talking about.

It’s this classic deflection where the filmmaker just refuses, says it’s a great question, but then doesn’t answer it no matter how great it is.

And there’s also a couple examples that can come up in the printed press from the 1940s that seem very similar.

So it looks like to me, if we were to try to guess at an origin for this, it’s when the popular press started doing these kinds of back and forth interviews, either in print or on the air.

So we’re probably looking at the rise of pop culture and the rise of radio.

In thinking about this, I thought it might be related, and this is consistent, I think, with what you’re saying.

It might be related to sort of a general leveling of society, a de-emphasis of distinctions of rank and privilege.

People speaking in the public and answering questions wanted their audience to understand that they didn’t feel that they were superior to them.

So that kind of democratization of the interview process.

Yeah, I like that a lot. It’s no longer the authority up front who cannot be challenged or accosted, right?

Right. That’s the idea.

Well, Jerry, that’s my best guess on the origin for that.

So I would say that Tom Shales mentioned in the Washington Post, which by no means is the only one from that period, sets at least the 1970s as a really strong point where it was already underway.

-huh. That’s interesting. Very interesting.

All right. Thanks so much for your call.

Well, thanks for giving me the opportunity to talk with you. I enjoyed it.

Take care now.

Bye bye.

Bye bye.

877-929-9673