I'm partway through writing a piece tentatively called anti-politics in the English language, you know, riffing on the George Orwell, the famous essay from 1946. I don't see a lot of money here. Yeah. Sometimes, well, it's not about the money. You know, it's about the clicks. It's about the eyeballs. And then the money that comes from them. No, but I was prompted because Corey Robin wrote this on his substack, and I wanted to bring this up because I think it's, I think it's interesting. I'm curious what you think. He says, my latest writing pet peeve, the use of a kind of and a sort of. I don't know when I began noticing this writing tick and myself and in the larger culture, and I don't know how long it has been around. I'm certain I've seen these phrases in writing from as long as a century ago, but

it's all over the place now. I associated with this sort of oops, I did it again, literary

affectation that one sees not only on social media, but in legacy media as well, along the lines

of Lionel trilling saying, Goerta says somewhere, but that's so

fucking lazy. But in a tweet, a poster of peace, it evokes a Jamesian spirit of the ineffitable,

the not quite, the almost, that liminal space between the is and the is not. It's meant to suggest

a fineness of distinction, I suppose, the subtlety of one's antenna, but it seems like

little more than a cover for an insufficiency of one's distinctions, a failure of thought,

an inability to state as fully as possible. One is thinking or trying to think, I can't stand

and I'm going to try to stop, kind of, sort of.

Well, I'm much more vulnerable to this tick in podcasting or just in speaking.

In speech, yeah, we all do it.

I remember the very first time I wrote an article for my high school newspaper, I had a

phrase in there that was like, this suggests to me at least, that.

And I remember I think my parents reading it and saying, you should, you should get rid of the, there's the suggest and at least. Yeah. Yeah. You're merely suggesting. They said, you should get rid of to me at least because you're writing your opinion. Everybody already knows it's to you at least. And I thought, oh, that's true. And I feel like that was a formative, I'm just unlocking this memory now. I feel like

that was a formative lesson and both concision in writing and also having the, having the courage to

stand by what you say. I don't know. It's when you're speaking, and I just did it there by saying,

I don't know. It's when you're speaking, I find, or, oh my God, oh my God. It's when I I'm speaking I find that I'm inclined to pepper the

conversation you're not going to be able to podcast anymore it's going to be like that scene in

bitter moon where they just like fuck we can't do this anymore and the parallels don't end there

yeah yeah but no I pepper in phrases like you know or And the parallels don't end there. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But no, I pepper in phrases like, you know, or like or kind of sort of, stand by or opinion, you know.

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