At the end of the day, we can’t do without verbal padding

I had last week the pleasure of lunch with Mark Mason. Between or perhaps while walking (overground) the route of the London Underground for his latest book, Walking the Lines, he has been writing occasionally for The Spectator. I had wanted to discuss with Mark his piece (‘It’s so annoying,’ 5 November) about the viral spread of the word ‘so’ as a pointless means of starting a sentence or conversation. Dot Wordsworth, too, has been confounded by the fashion, and I reported the phenomenon many months ago in the Times; though on this magazine’s letters page a weary reader has reviewed the great debate and concluded ‘So what?’

So – well, what? Our lunch led me to a whole new speculation about language. If I’m right then I’ve wasted most of my life in a permanent Vesuvian eruption of indignation about meaningless words and phrases. I’ve missed the point. They’re supposed to be meaningless. Only now, late in my life, have I come to understand this important function of language: to say nothing.

Even as a teenager I was railing against the How-do-you-dos, Beg-your-pardons and Your-good-selves that could so much more efficiently be conveyed by Hello, Pardon or You. In my twenties my bugbear was prolix Americanisms that gave us the redundant ‘currently’ or the sloppy ‘at this moment in time’ (or, worse, ‘as of now’) in place of ‘now’ or even just the present tense.

My thirties, as I was introduced to parliamentary life, were spent in a waste of fury at ‘I hear what you say,’ ‘at the end of the day’ in place of ‘understood’ or ‘finally’; or berating ‘I really must, if I may, with all due respect, Mr Deputy Speaker, take issue with the Rt hon, Learned and Gallant Gentleman’ in place of ‘I disagree’.