Years ago, I noticed a phenomenon that struck me as strange at the time:
after spending two weeks looking for a new apartment, I could not stop
noticing "for rent" signs even after I had found one. Of course, I later
learned that the human cognitive system just works that way -- our
perceptual system stays busy making sure we *don't* notice things. A
similar thing happened later, when I did some research on the way people
use the expression "the fact is..." and found it everywhere.
When dealing with instances like the sentence Ward found ("At ABC we
take the obligation to report world news very serious") there are at
*least* three possibilities:
(1) It was a slip of the tongue. Read any close transcript of a live
broadcast, and you'll find far, far more of these than you probably
noticed while listening to it. In fact, doing an accurate, close
transcript of someone's speech is an excellent way of making him/her
look like a blithering idiot. Whether it's a slip or not can be
established fairly well by looking at what else that person says
(although you may have to look at a *lot* of text). If that same
reporter, in this case, later says something like, "And to prove
that we do, in fact, take it seriously...," it was probably just
a goof the first time, at least as far as that speaker's formal
register goes.
(2) People have been doing that since dirt was invented, and you
just now noticed. Potentially, something made you look for it,
and so now it's
really horrifying to notice how common it is (that was my
experience
with "the fact is...," which is typically used before something
that is not in any sense a fact). Did Edward Murrow take anything
serious?
(3) It really is the forefront of a change. Like rising intonation?
That you get on all the sentences? Said by young people?
I have no idea which of these three applies in this case. If it's #3, we
can at least take solace in the fact that German has no strong
adverb/adjective distinction at all, and its speakers seem to have
survived.
Bill Spruiell
Dept. of English
Central Michigan University
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