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Comment by triyambakam | Hacker News Reader

> which honestly kind of upset me a lot

I've seen this language more and more frequently: minimized (kind of) + maximized (a lot) qualifiers. No real insight, just interesting.

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In my idiom, at least, "kind of" is not solely deminisher, but can also be an approximater - to say something "kind of upset me" _could_ mean "it upset me, but not a great deal", or it could mean "it had an effect on me which is complicated and difficult to concisely describe, but which can be approximately described as 'upset'". In that reading, this isn't a contradiction at all - "which honestly had an extremely large effect on me which was similar to, but not entirely the same as, being upset".

I don’t think the “kind of” here is serving to minimize the “upset ness”. I think it’s describing the fact that the person wasn’t really “upset”, but some other emotion which they can’t express, which was kind of like being upset, but not exactly the same.

As a modifier it's kind of a mollifier

Edit: just looked it up and wikipedia has a difinition I didn't know :)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mollifier

However in the colloquial usage 'round these parts mollifier means to soften or make gentle

https://www.etymonline.com/word/mollify#etymonline_v_17411

To my non-native speaker ear, “a lot” indicates the strength the emotion (“very upset”), while “kind of” is a defensive wording indicating lack of objectivity or surety (“not saying it’s objectively annoying, but it does upset me”). It shows up a lot, in my experience, when people are talking about something anecdotal or subjective.

I think "kind of" is being used as a modal marker here, similar to how "like" is used. In particular, this could have been said as "which honestly like upset me", but because of some negative backlash against excessive use of "like" as a marker, people have switched to using other words.

This particular use of the word is trying to "soften the blow" of the discomfort that the listener (in this case, reader) would feel at the un-modified phrase. So if you just said "which honestly upset me a lot" that might seem like an extreme reaction for just a price increase of some service (it's not as if someone is dying), so the "kind of" is added to signal to the listener/reader that the speaker acknowledges that this is perhaps too-strong language for the situation.

In terms of annoying-once-you-notice-it idioms, should readers assume dishonesty on all other statements made by people that prefix only some small subset of their claims with 'Honestly ...' and 'To be honest ...'?

It's typically used for statements that might otherwise be interpreted non-literally or hyperbolically. Of course the risk is that over time it becomes so commonplace that it starts to be used itself to connote hyperbole, much like how "literally" has come to mean "figuratively" in many uses. But c'est la vie.

no, it's just a carelessness

No, because they mean "honest" in the sense of "frank/unguarded", not "truthful".

'To be frank [or candid] ...' seems like a superior phrase, in that case.

Nice catch. I've been using this construction and I've been oblivious to its hypocrisy until now :) I might start seeing how far I can stretch it to make it obvious how silly it is. "Which honestly did not at all upset me a ridiculous amount." Sounds unhinged.

This is definitely a thing, and I worry that I'm guilty of it myself.

I don't know if I should thank you for this insight or if you just cursed me.

This. I've seen a lot using this on its own more and more frequently too.

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