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Comment by eptcyka | Hacker News Reader

You don't need to prepend the "I mean," to the first sentence of your post, unless you're under the impression that most of your introductions will not be perceived as genuinely yours.

And I don't believe that this kind of obsession with being technically correct will lead to great social outcomes.

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The "I mean" is added to give an informal tone instead of a "Here is a correction since you are incorrect" tone. Obviously it wasn't enough.

> And I don't believe that this kind of obsession with being technically correct will lead to great social outcomes.

There is no such obsession. It's a joke, meant in jest. I'm confirming that parent is correct, and that I'm just being nitpicky for the sake of giving the title a meaning even if it's incorrect.

Granted, in real-life social situations, it's easier to spot when people are joking, in comparison to online text-only comments. Especially when the place where you leave the comment is particularly famous for being dry.

Right or wrong, I find it fascinating to watch language evolve like this and it's really apparent most in internet comments. I see so many sentences starting with "I mean" over the last couple of years where I can't remember it being commonplace before.

"For sure" is another sentence starter I've noticed, then there are terms like "on trend" which now seems to mean fashionable or popular.

I'd love to do a ngram analysis of this phenomena (?), or maybe just something simple with elastic search on Reddit comments where you can see how the use of search terms grows and evolves.

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