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I'm curious, what's particular about that quote? Nothing jumps to me, but I'm a non-native speaker.
by icebraining 7y ago
I'm curious, what's particular about that quote? Nothing jumps to me, but I'm a non-native speaker.
- jessaustin 7y agoFirst, the superfluous "actually". In the late 1990s, every Yard conversation was peppered with "actually". I was on the phone with an HR person for my first job out of school, I dropped an "actually" on her, and she (rightfully) read me the riot act. (So, actually, the idiom could have changed by now... it apparently hadn't changed much at the time Zuck attended.) Second, the implicit comparison between the great stupendous thing that "I" did with the minimal barely-worth-mentioning thing that "you" did. As if "thinking" and "deciding" were somehow so much more important than "suggesting". We can be certain that if the conversation roles were reversed then the implied relative importance of the different actions would also have been reversed. This was just a particular flavor of a more general rhetorical activity we called "flexing", back then. Lots of intimidated kids, attempting to intimidate in turn.
- icebraining 7y agoThanks!
- 6gvONxR4sf7o 7y agoIt's kinda defensive in an 'I'm smarter than you' way. Replace "actually did think" with "thought." "Actually" says "no you're wrong." Remove "before you even suggested it." Saying you did it first attempts to position yourself as smarter. Adding "even" diminishes it. Making those changes, you end up with a less insecure, less posturing version, "I thought about integrating it into houseSYSTEM, but I decided that it’s probably best to keep them separated at least for now."