What is it called when an author writes a sentence such as this:
They call him Tiny because he is , well, tiny.
or
The gloomy day turned out to be, well, gloomy.
I just finished a book in which the author does this at least 6 times and I find it annoying and amateurish. I would think that any decent writer would frown upon this. I’m not asking if it is grammatically correct, but is there a term for this construction?
I’d call it a “conversational” style.
Conversational style works. Thanks.
I’m not sure the problem was that he wasn’t using well grammatically.
The key is using well well.
Synonym for “Um”. it means “Don’t rush me, I’m thinking of the right word to use here”.
Those are known as “filled pauses.” I’m not sure it fills that role here, though. To me, it does add a smidgen of meaning, so I wouldn’t call it syntactically empty.
When a stylistic phrase in either prose or conversation becomes repetitive, it’s called a verbal tic. And yes, it’s annoying.
“Well” in the OP context is a meaningful pause to denote an affirmation that the same word in the same or a different part of speech previously used was meant literally and not figuratively. In the first example the proper noun “Tiny” is affirmed as meaning that the named individual was actually physically tiny, as opposed to being named that out of some mocking sarcasm or some other reason.
The “um” pause instance of “well, …” typically occurs at the beginning of sentences and is at least preferable to the regrettable “so” that we hear far too often. Both are a way of beginning a response with a kind of auditory lead-in that makes it less abrupt than it otherwise would be. “Well” works in that regard, but many of us hate “so” because it plainly means “therefore”, and it’s stupid because “therefore” requires an antecedent for a stated consequence, whereas “so” is used for any random blather in response to anything. It’s almost like a verbal tic with many people.
Posted before I saw yours. Yes, I agree, but I’d classify a “verbal tic” as something that was completely useless, and not something that served even some small modicum of purpose.
He did it six times in an entire book, and you found it annoying? How big was the book?
It annoyed me because it smacks of laziness. Someone who writes for a living should have a decent vocabulary, or at least a thesaurus. The examples I gave in the OP I made up arbitrarily to make a point. Here’s an actual quote: *Uselessness is, well, useless.
(She also wrote “from whence” 3 times. ARRRRGGGH!)
I wouldn’t have noticed. It’s, well, how people talk.
It all depends on context - you could imagine plenty of fictional narrators who would “speak” in that sort of conversational style, and I’ve certainly used this formulation for sarcastic or comic effect (but it needs to be used sparingly).
However, if this is a non-fictional writer expounding some particular topic or arguing a particular point, it might indeed be an indicator not so much of lazy style as of superficiality of thought (in which case a thesaurus isn’t going to help much). “From whence” is, I agree, not a good sign.
‘Well’ has been morphed by teenagers into an adjective meaning very.
“'e’s well fit innit…”
“She’s well fat, poor cow.”
Peanuthead, give us those six sentences using “well” from the book and tell us how you would rewrite each of them to fit into the style you want to use. Are there other examples of the author’s writing in that book in a style that you don’t like? Is the problem not this one habit of the author but the fact that the entire book is written in a style that you don’t like?
bob++ writes:
> ‘Well’ has been morphed by teenagers into an adjective meaning very.
> “'e’s well fit innit…”
> “She’s well fat, poor cow.”
I’ve never heard a teenager use “well” in that way. I realize that you’re British and listening to different teenagers than I am, but I lived in England from 1987 to 1990 and have been back 11 times on vacation (including five weeks in this September and October) and didn’t recognize that as the way that teenagers talk. I just did some Googling and have found the following mention of the recent use of “well” in this way:
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=3633
It’s an old dialectal use of “well” that has apparently recently become common among young people in certain parts of the U.K.
At least the author used ‘well’ instead of, like, ‘like’.
Here is a link to the book. The Confidence Game: Why We Fall For It…Every Time. The subject matter was heavy on the psychology and referenced a good number of scientific experiments.
Now *that *would have put me over the edge. It’s one reason I have a difficult time having a conversation with anyone under the age of 40.
The term might be used as the blunt instrument that was alluded to by the two examples in the OP, but more often, a synonym is used. “They called him Tiny because he was, well, not very big” seems to me to be a more common usage, which authors use to indicate that someone is stating the obvious, but obvious as it is, it is worth noting. If you remove “well” from the expression, the reader will think it an absurd redundancy, and the “well” is put in there as a marker of explanation: Yes, I know goddam well that it is a redundancy, but there exists a context in which it is appropriate.
There was a very good but eccentric ballplayer named Manny Ramirez. Sports people got into the habit of saying “That’s just Manny being Manny” – leaving out the “well”, but delivering the tautology anyway because there was a place for it. It’s one of those “If you joined us late” expressions, that brings the uninitiated up to speed.
Well, Wiktionary notes that one meaning of “well” as an interjection is “Used in speech to express the overcoming of reluctance to say something.”
I agree with Ornery Bob that this is a conversational style of writing. The writer is writing as if he were speaking to you, feigning a reluctance to state something so obvious as that a gloomy day is gloomy.
It’s potentially self-informing, to notice when some language usage habit in others, becomes iritating to you.
I suggest pondering it a bit when you discover you are annoyed, not to figure out as the thread starter did here (so far at least) what sort of pejorative label to assign to the speaker/writer, but rather to discover what the speech/writing habit reminds you of, that would result in the negative emotions.