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Message: <blockquote data-quote="CleverNickName" data-source="post: 8046439" data-attributes="member: 50987">I am also a midwesterner (transplanted to the Pacific Northwest about 15 years ago), and it's probably a cultural thing like you suggest.  But the more I think about it, the more I think my personal problems with these phrases lie with how I parse them.  I'm not neurotypical, you see, and my brain works in a very literal and analytical fashion.  It's why I'm an engineer and scientist, and not a public speaker.   I'm very much a "words have meanings" type of person.So when someone starts a sentence with "I'm sorry" I try to read that as an apology, and if they follow it with the word "but" it switches to an exception.  The phrase "I'm sorry but" then reads as a deception or misdirection.  "I realize what I did was wrong, but I'm not going to apologize for it."  It would be less condescending to just say "Don't take this the wrong way..."The word "but" trips me up a lot in conversation, now that I think about it.  Some people sprinkle their sentences and phrases with that word a lot, but my brain reads language like a math equation or computer code and every time it hits that "but" it reverses polarity.  Like someone sprinkling negative integers into a math equation.  "I'm sorry but" = I'm not sorry.  "I don't want to sound __ but" = I want to sound that way.  "I agree but" = I don't really agree.  "I love hamburgers but" = I don't like hamburgers at all. It's very confusing to follow sometimes.And likewise, when someone says "to be honest," my brain immediately wants to know why the speaker felt the need to clarify that this particular statement as honest, and I begin to wonder about the honesty of everything else that was stated up to that point.  It flags the speaker as untrustworthy. "Oh now he's being honest?  Why did he start now?"  It doesn't help that this statement is also only ever used for opinions, not facts.  "I know this is just my opinion, but it's very important for my argument that you agree, so I'm going to flag it as honest and see if it slides past."  In both cases, it would just be better to say "In my opinion..."These are just little linguistic tics that my brain has.  I've learned to deal with them, but they still make my eye twitch from time to time and make it harder for me to understand stuff sometimes.But it's not entirely my brain's fault.  The "devil's advocate" statement will always and forever read as "I am a jerk who always wants to argue."  Maybe that wasn't always the case, but it certainly is now in the Age of the Internet.  Folks who declare themselves the devil's advocate in a discussion aren't trying to engage in meaningful discourse, they are only trying to express a caustic point of view while insulating themselves from negative criticism or backlash.  "Hey, don't be mad at me, I'm just playing the devil's advocate here..."  Ugh, nobody needs that.   It would be better to just spit it out and let the chips fall where they may.  "Have you considered..."</blockquote>

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