January 27, 2003
Frankly, My Dear
Eugene Volokh blogs on the phrase "to be honest." He rightly criticizes it for being either redundant or insulting.
...I've tried to avoid this locution, precisely because people who actually pay attention to the phrase might quite reasonably be put off -- either you're acknowledging that you might be dishonest in other contexts, or, more likely, you're trying to buttress your credibility in an unpersuasive way.
All right. But he then extends the same criticism to "frankly" which seems misguided. The OED and my own experience give "frankly" as "Without concealment, disguise, or reserve; avowedly, openly, plainly." (emphasis mine).
When I use frankly in speech (and I assume I am not alone in this) I mean to signal that I am about to say something in a less decorous or elliptical manner than the listener is prepared for. In a scholarship interview, one might say "because frankly, our student government is a battle between the dishonest and the incompetent," and in a romantic movie one might respond to one's former lover "frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn." In each case, the word signals useful content-- not that the speaker was being dishonest before he became "frank" but that he was being indirect. There's nothing insulting about indirectness. Quite the contrary.
Updates:
I: Volokh updates his post to defend "bluntly". All the more reason that "frankly" should be taken off the hit-list.
II: I think a good defense can be mounted for "honestly" as well. Both Smith and Volokh dislike the fact that it implies that one wasn't being honest beforehand, and as an honest person, I sympathize. But even this has its place.
First off, many people are not honest much of the time-- when answering the question "how are you?," or when commenting on other people's clothing, for example. The social expectation is that these answers will be "fine, thanks, yourself?" and "it's lovely," largely independent of the truth. "To be honest," like "frankly," serves as a warning to the listener that one is about to deliver a factually correct answer rather than a socially correct answer, and thus nulls the shock a bit.
Secondly, people often exaggerate and expect others to exaggerate, so "to be honest" can be used just as "literally" can (literally is often misused, of course), and "to be honest" sounds much less pretensious than "to be accurate". So one can say "to be honest, I think Representative Dan Burton is an idiot" to distinguish this as an actual pronouncement on his intelligence rather than a more general complaint about having made bad (or badly-motivated) decisions. The second usage seems a bit of a stretch to me, and it should be avoided when possible since it invites misinterpretation, but I've knowingly done it myself, and not only when speaking extemporaneously.
TrackBack URL for this entry: