07-15-2010, 09:29 PM
silvarios wrote:
[quote=PeterB]
My point was that adding "Well" to the beginning of the sentence has an element of PCness, yes...
What? Or better yet, how? What is politically correct about "well"? Has the whole world gone mad?
Well, adding "well" to the beginning of the sentence is (as others have pointed out) a modifier, which really doesn't need to be there in a lot of cases. It can be an attempt to modify speech so as to either make it less threatening, less committal, or more diffuse-- and also less exacting.
"Each of these passages has faults of its own, but, quite apart from avoidable ugliness, two qualities are common to all of them. The first is staleness of imagery; the other is lack of precision. The writer either has a meaning and cannot express it, or he inadvertently says something else, or he is almost indifferent as to whether his words mean anything or not. This mixture of vagueness and sheer incompetence is the most marked characteristic of modern English prose, and especially of any kind of political writing. As soon as certain topics are raised, the concrete melts into the abstract and no one seems able to think of turns of speech that are not hackneyed: prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated hen-house. I list below, with notes and examples, various of the tricks by means of which the work of prose-construction is habitually dodged."
http://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/poli...sh/e_polit