Using "well" grammatically

Sounds to me like simply a shortening of a longstanding idiom used in both British and American flavors of English: “She’s well and truly fat, the poor cow.”

I suspect most Americans will read “well and truly” as a Britishism. Which if true, supports the observation you’re seeing the shorter form in Britain while the US folks above are not.

Humans pepper their speech with a lot of filler. “Um”, “you know”, “like” and so forth*. “Well” can do double duty here. Both as filler and intensifier. It’s a win-win! (Well, maybe not a “win” so much.)

If you don’t put such filler in your writing representing normal speech, it will come off as abnormal and/or formal. It can be used to help fill out the personality of a character. (As long as you use the same type of filler for the character.)

  • Much to the dismay of Southern US grammar purists, I hear “y’all” being used this way quite often.

The phrase “so so” must drive you crazy then. :slight_smile:
For what it’s worth, since this is GQ, “so” has been used as an introductory particle since about 1700. It’s actually a fairly old usage.

You might want to stay away from Shakespeare’s 48th sonnet. A full 7% of the stanzas begin with this usage. :slight_smile: Again, since this is GQ, I feel I should point out that “from whence” is extremely common, dating to the early 1400s at the latest.

How careful was I when I took my way,
Each trifle under truest bars to thrust,
That to my use it might unused stay
From hands of falsehood, in sure wards of trust!
But thou, to whom my jewels trifles are,
Most worthy comfort, now my greatest grief,
Thou best of dearest, and mine only care,
Art left the prey of every vulgar thief.
Thee have I not locked up in any chest,
Save where thou art not, though I feel thou art,
Within the gentle closure of my breast,
From whence at pleasure thou mayst come and part;
And even thence thou wilt be stol’n I fear,
For truth proves thievish for a prize so dear.

I guess I can cut ol’ Willie a little slack. :smiley:

The one example given was “Uselessness is, well, useless.”

Though I have no objection to that form myself, it could be written in a less conversational form:
“Uselessness is, obviously, useless.”
“Uselessness is, of course, useless.”
“It goes without saying that uselessness is useless.”
“Uselessness, by definition, is useless.”

I mostly use well in the following manner:

You: Hey Omar, how are you?
Me: I’m well, thank you.

Yup, here’s linguist Mark Liberman on the issue:

The Social Psychology of Linguistic Naming and Shaming.

Wendell, It’s a widespread and well established British idiom, now decades old (I’m a London native). It’s used with particular frequency with certain (also colloquial) adjectives.

“well fit” = very attractive

“well chuffed” = very pleased

This is the closest to what I was thinking. “Well” in the OP’s first example essentially stands for, “Even though I know I just said tiny, it really is the best word for the situation, so pardon the redundancy; I’m about to use it again…”

I get it, and I think it can be a fairly effective tool for emphasis. Perhaps what irks Peanuthead is the author’s overuse of the technique. I’m not sure I’d choose the word lazy, though.

These sentences have two features, repetition and interjection.

Purdue University’s OWL website is a good resource for points of grammar and their webpage on sentence construction seems to indicate that these two examples would fit the definition of a compound sentence:
https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/573/02/

Purude University’s OWL website also has information on parallel structure (repetition) in sentences:
https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/623/01/

Butte College’s Center for Academic Success has a webage with tip sheets on grammar and their sheet on Interjections uses “well” as an example:
https://www.butte.edu/departments/cas/tipsheets/grammar/interjections.html

Based on these sources, your sentences appear to be compound types with interjection and parallelism. You might try contacting the reference librarians at the Internet Public Library at Frequently Asked Reference Questions | ipl: Information You Can Trust to see if they can assist you further.