For some reason you like soup. For some reason the traffic is bad. For some reason it’s later than you thought.
You don’t need to tell me that. I didn’t secretly suspect it was for no reason at all. If it was, that’d be notable and I’d be interested in hearing it. Or if you wanted to elaborate on what that reason was. That’d be conversation.
But “for some reason” is the number one most meaningless collection of syllables. There are things that are better left unspoken because they are so mindnumbingly inane that they put the universe at risk of imploding out of boredom. The fact that whatever you are about to share is 'for some reason" is one of them. We may as well begin each sentence with “I’m talking”.
Just say what you want to say. If you want to qualify it, use a real qualifier. Outright say “I have no idea why I’d want soup when my great aunt drowned in soup when I was five and it traumatized me”. Or “The traffic was bad and that’s odd because it’s usually pretty clear at four AM”. Or “It’s later than I thought because I drank too damn much. Oops!”
Don’t do this namby-pamby verbal tapdance around nothing.
For some reason a brillliant streak of red flashes across the sky
For some reason a cat is brown
For some reason we turn away
For some reason a man picks up his pace
For some reason a star explodes
For some reason a thing is itself
For some reason I’m listening to Tool.
sorry…
Or else it implies that we all know what that reason was, or implying suspicion of the interlocutor: “For some reason, my wallet isn’t where I left it… any idea of why that might be?”
Personally, I find it reassuring. It is, if you will, an affirmation of belief in an ordered universe; a conscious statement that we live in a world which is based on rationality and causality; that we are not mere scraps of consciousness, tossed hither and thither upon the raging seas of primal chaos …
Or it’s just a verbal tic, something that people say.
Either way, I can’t seem to work up much ire about it. For some reason.
I say, “for some strange reason…”. Does my addition of the word “strange” give me a pit pass? I suppose it’s just habit, but the use in my circle can be pretty funny. (at least to us… for some strange reason)
Some of us spend a lot of time around pathologically curious people who want to know precisely why everything happens. For us, saying that things happen “for some reason” is self defense against interrogation, frustration, and ultimately saying unkind things to these people.
For me, saying “For some reason” is a substitute for saying “I don’t know what caused this result…” and is used to indicate that the result was somewhat of a surprise.
Saying, “For some reason traffic was really heavy this morning” points out that heavy traffic was not only unexpected, but the cause is not known. I could say, “Traffic was really heavy this morning”, but then that kind of leaves open the question of whether there is a known cause or if it was expected.
Would it be better to say, “I have no idea why traffic was really heavy this morning, but I certainly wasn’t expecting it as it is usually pretty clear. Do you know why?”.
That’s the other connotation of “for some reason”: “this seems too peculiar to be random chance/chaos. I invite speculation as to what the reason was.”
Nobody would say “For some reason it’s cloudy today,” unless they lived somewhere where there were no clouds.
I find that this is a common usage of the phrase. Indicating that the reason is either unknown or highly unusual. We (the general we) tend to leave the word strange out when using it thought, for some reason.
It’s supposed to, but for some reason it’s generalized to mean everything and thusly nothing at all. It’s now a meaningless colletion of syllables as the OP says–here in SoCal, anyway. (The locals here are big on talking nonsense and littering their conversations with meaningless fluff. At least every, like, fourth word is, like, “like” or, like, “dude”. That’s not an exaggeration. Wild redundancy and excessive repetition are both par for the course, and totally expected in everyday conversation. Uhhh, there’s a lot of, like, nonverbal pauses and, well, let’s just say you have to like listen for like an hour to get like a minute’s worth of like information.
Dude!
We really do talk like that. I caught it a couple years back, too.
Oh man, you don’t know my friends. I think I’ve actually head this out of one of them.
They even say it for things that are mind numbingly obvious. “For some reason, I like it when I get unexpected money.”, “For some reason, I like having a good job.”. “For some reason, I woke up this morning”.
Mostly, I think, they are too timid to say what they want to say, so they use this to shield themself in case I say something like “You know, it’s May. There are always clouds in the sky in May.” They are leaving themself a conversational out to take back what they just said if challenged.
Drives me nuts. If you don’t have the guts to say it, just keep quiet. Don’t sluff the burden of conversation off on everyone else. Don’t cage and hedge around your opinons and pretend that might not really be what you want to say. Its not fair, it’s boring, and it sucks.
I’ve read that this is the reason people say “like” every other word. It’s a shield. If they’re challenged, it wasn’t as if they actually said something. They just said, like, something.
Around here, it’s because their mouth moves faster than the neurons in their language cortex can fire, and they need to throw meaningless syllables in the middle so the neurons can catch up. I’m pretty sure I live in the Like Capital of the World and I can’t remember anyone using ‘like’ as a shield; most people here have no idea how much they say it and don’t pay any attention to its place in their sentences. I mean, people will say “I only said like a car”, but only when that’s what they actually said–not when “like” was just a filler word that came before “a car”.
For some reason a brillliant streak of red flashes across the sky