Latest / The Strategic Linguist Podcast
The Politeness Machine: What Brown and Levinson Actually Discovered
Someone tells you, calmly, that they’re giving you your time back. Someone else, mid-story, asks: “can I stop you there?” A third person, cornered on a specific and documented harm, tells you it wasn’t their intention. A fourth hedges an idea they’ve been sitting with for three weeks: “I might be wrong, but...”Four different rooms. Four different speakers. Four sentences that sound, on the surface, like nothing at all — procedural, generous, careful, uncertain.None of them are doing what they sound like they’re doing.There’s a fifty-year-old framework that explains all four, and most people…
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