I actually think that the word “actual” is interesting since many people seem to pepper their statements with it. I originally thought it was mainly a discourse

I actually think that the word “actual” is interesting since many people seem to pepper their statements with it. I originally thought it was mainly a discourse marker (“Actually [interjection], the moon is not made of cheese”), but it is often used unprompted (not as a response to anything else): “I actually like the flavor of cheese”—why not just “I like the flavor of cheese”? Some people who monologue (like in a video) about a subject often use it. “Cleopatra was actually not black.” This makes some sense since you use it to emphasize something that you assume might be surprising, instead of using a more flat statement. But it gets weird when the speaker supposedly thinks that every statement that they make is surprising or even astounding to the hypothetical listener. No: many statements are expected, and some statements you had no prejudice about one way or the other, so the listener has nothing to be surprised about. It feels like the the monologuer assumes that they are just blowing the minds of the listener on a continual basis. It’s also often used for excessive emphasis: “I actually love ice cream”. Like “ice cream is literally my favorite flavor”. Excessive emphasis IMO should be sparingly used or else it loses its effect. It’s like “literally”: it can have a humorous effect when used to mean “figuratively”, but if you regularly use it like that it becomes lame. (But I have lost that battle: literally now literally means both “in the literal sense” and “in the figurative sense”.) I don’t appreciate the affect of someone who emphasizes every third sentence while speaking, and to me these emphasis words have the same effect when I read them.