This is an awful article. The title is linkbait and the opinions offered are given with little contradictory evidence. Anticipating what somebody's response mi

This is an awful article. The title is linkbait and the opinions offered are given with little contradictory evidence. Anticipating what somebody's response might be -- "you hurt my feelings!" or "You're lying" -- is part of human communication. Why have three exchanges when I can just anticipate your response and cover the most likely mistakes you might make? Moves the conversation along faster. They also serve a critical role in the emotional nature of discourse. If I say, "To be honest", I am preparing the listener for something that might be more blunt than they are prepared to hear. "No offense, but" gets the reader ready to hear something they may find offensive. It's not that I am being disingenuous. Far from it. I'm simply trying to apply a little balm before the burn comes. In life we have to say things to people that they may not want to hear. It is critically important that we learn how to "do the dance" with throwaway words and phrases like this in order that we can give -- and get -- information we may find hard to digest. Yes, you can pull out a broad brush and say it's lying, but you're entirely missing the point of such phrases by doing so. Written communication to some degree mirrors vocal communication. We will always have a need to help each other emotionally as we talk about important things. Calling each other liars because the literal meanings of phrases don't exactly match up with the intention of the speaker is to confuse the practice of language with the semantic meaning of the words, something any linguist worth his salt should know not to do.