You also forgot “sorry for the ..., but ...”, “I’m getting sick of ...”, “oft-repeated”, “we can do better”, and “and I forgot one ...”. Language is built out

You also forgot “sorry for the ..., but ...”, “I’m getting sick of ...”, “oft-repeated”, “we can do better”, and “and I forgot one ...”. Language is built out of little phrases which come to be associated with an understood meaning and tone, and are treated atomically (sometimes the individual words within the phrases go out of currency and are never used alone). We all use these little atoms as shortcuts all the time, because inventing a completely new phrase to represent every thought would be less efficient. Sometimes the phrases were originally technical terms (for instance, many come from sailing or driving carriages or manual farm labor or ancient styles of combat ...) which have been stripped of their original context; other times they come from literature, like the “shocked, shocked” example, or hundreds of examples from Shakespeare plays. Douglas Hofstadter has written some nice pieces about this topic, e.g. https://prelectur.stanford.edu/lecturers/hofstadter/analogy.html https://prelectur.stanford.edu/lecturers/hofstadter/analogy....