I far overuse the word "actually". This used to be just a linguistic tic I was aware of but didn't see much problem with, but the modern association of the word with mansplainers and MRAs is beginning to cause me some embarrassment.
Part of my problem with dropping it, though, is that my own use of it tends to be firmly seated in a gender context itself... a context of technically capable men who have been trained for life to speak as if they're positive their words are true even when they're throwing a wild-ass guess. So, "actually that's not how [this thing I've been working on for 6 months that they've vaguely heard about in passing] works at all; the foo does bar in this situation" seems a reasonable business compromise between sentences that include the words "bull crap" and ones that incorrectly imply that I'm not really sure what I'm talking about, either.
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Date: 2015-10-20 03:08 am (UTC)From:Part of my problem with dropping it, though, is that my own use of it tends to be firmly seated in a gender context itself... a context of technically capable men who have been trained for life to speak as if they're positive their words are true even when they're throwing a wild-ass guess. So, "actually that's not how [this thing I've been working on for 6 months that they've vaguely heard about in passing] works at all; the foo does bar in this situation" seems a reasonable business compromise between sentences that include the words "bull crap" and ones that incorrectly imply that I'm not really sure what I'm talking about, either.