So to Speak by William Safire (Cheney and deferentialism)

[Democrats_win]

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/16/magazine/16wwln_safire.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

--SNIPS

"There seems to be a virus going around on television," e-mails Olivia Hugill, "that causes people to make a sort of verbal parenthesis and insert the term if you will. This may have started with V.P. Cheney, who is fond of the phrase, and now it's spreading unchecked. Could you do a riff on the subject so that we might ridicule it into permanent retirement?"

...Today it deserves more profound treatment than a mere riff; it has to do with the kudzu-like creep of deferentialisms, on which I have been assembling a dossier in the years since.

The vice president, as Hugill notes, is a frequent deferentialist. Asked a couple of months ago about threatened Congressional restrictions on the National Security Agency's surveillance program, he told Jim Lehrer, on the "NewsHour" on PBS, that "the possible amendment, if you will, to additional legislation" would be damaging. (One year ago, Cheney used the same deferentialism on the subject of Iraq: "I think they're in the last throes, if you will, of the insurgency.")

If you will is a shortening of "if you will permit me to say" or "if you will pardon my saying so," which is not quite what the clipped phrase means. The speaker or writer needs no such permission; on the contrary, the shortening means "I'm going to say this, and you may not like it, but that's just too bad, so here goes." The point is not to show deference, as the words say, but to make a pass at submissive respect while making a forceful point.

...Rhetoricians have Greek names for phrases like as it were, so to speak and if you will, calling them metanoia or correctio. Prof. Frederick Dolan of the University of California at Berkeley says that they are often "ways of ironically drawing attention to the fact that understatement is being used — and so to the cleverness of the understatement (and understater)." I say that such deferentialisms are smarmily pretentious, not to put too fine a point on it.

[BeFree]

1. As if to say...

...don't you dare argue with me, if you will, I'll take your head off.

And dead eye dick will do it, too. The smarmy bastard.