A Denton, Texas, caller wonders: Are politicians increasingly starting sentences with the phrase “Now, look…”? This is part of a complete episode.
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I wrote in about something like this recently. Specifically, it was about how “I mean” is being used to start a sentence without any previous statement to restate–almost as if there were some unsaid statement that the speaker were just skipping over to get right to the restatement. I’ve noticed this usage just in the last year or two and I was wondering if you’ve noticed it and how it got started.