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Written by asap
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Wednesday, 06 September 2006 |
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It’s largely ceremonial, usually ignored and basically pointless.
We are not talking about the job of the vice president. We are talking about the syntax of the vice president.
We are talking about the verbal nicety “if you will,” a quaint, effete, fuddy-duddy of a phrase to which the second-most important leader in the free world seems eerily attached.
Vice President Dick Cheney loves to pepper his sentences with “if you will.” Check the transcripts of his speeches and TV appearances and you’ll find, again and again, those three words — huddled safely inside the protective embrace of commas, like a trio of rich kids afraid to get their nice clothes dirty by rough-housing with the rest of the sentence.
“If you will” sounds excessively refined and a trifle sissified. “If you will” sounds as if it ought to be uttered with a French accent.
It sounds, that is, very un-Cheney-like. Yet when Cheney spoke with reporters just after Sen. Joseph Lieberman’s recent defeat in the Connecticut Democratic primary, the vice president said, “The thing that’s partly disturbing about it is the fact that, (from) the standpoint of our adversaries, if you will, in this conflict, and the al-Qaida types, they clearly are betting on the proposition that they can break the will of the American people.”
The “if you will” sounded oddly familiar. Cheney seems to employ it quite a bit, but just to be sure, we quickly checked a variety of his public statements over the past several years. They were lousy with “if you will.”
In a Sept. 14, 2003, interview on “Meet the Press,” Cheney declared, “From our perspective, trying to deal with this continuing campaign of terror, if you will, the war on terror that we’re engaged in, this is a continuing enterprise.”
And on it goes, an epidemic of “if you will” in Cheney’s chats.
Gregory Pullum, linguistics professor at the University of California at Santa Cruz and frequent contributor to the blog Language Log, has opined several times about “if you will,” defining it as “a way to signal hedging about vocabulary choice — a momentary uncertainty about whether the adjacent expression is exactly the right form of words or not.”
Cheney, though, is not known for harboring uncertainties about anything, from foreign policy to phraseology. Thus there must be something else going on when he goes to the “if you will” well.
Chronology may be a clue. Cheney is 65. “If you will” has a fusty, antiquated ring to it, a sort of fussy Victorian overpoliteness, along the lines of its close cousin “if I may” or “as it were.”
English, moreover, has a notorious grab bag of verbal hedges, Bob Kennedy reminds us. “Each of these different hedges has its own type of social appropriateness,” writes Kennedy, a linguist at the University of California at Santa Barbara, in an e-mail. “Some sound weird coming from the mouths of 20-somethings, some sound weird coming from vice-presidents.”
The language purists who cringe at “like,” Pullum writes, should withhold their scorn: “The people who grouse about ‘like’ are myopic old whiners who haven’t looked at their own, like, linguistic foibles, if you will,” he adds playfully. | Only registered users can write comments.
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