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WELL-QUALIFIED

                                              January 15, 2007

   "Did I say that?  It must have been because
    like the late Henry James, we qualify every
    statement in case it should be in danger of
    meaning too much."  -- p.145

        John Dickson Carr,
        "The Dead Man's Knock" (1958)
        Gideon Fell, speaking.  p. 145



          Myself, I have continual
          problems with excessive
          qualification... everything                Of course, there are
          must be tentative, weakend...              people with the opposite
                                                     problem: they like
                  This or that is                    strong, direct statments,
                  "probably" the                     even when they're
I've always       case, "under some                  demonstrably wrong.
looked            circumstances",
askance at        "in my opinion",                      If I had to choose
prose with        and so on.                            a problem to have,
"I think"s                                              I'd prefer to have
spread            Just in case                          mine.
around.           there's a
                  case I have
                  considered yet?
Why would
you be saying
it if you            The difficulty is that qualifying
didn't think         a statement doesn't always make
it?                  it less likely to be wrong.

                     When the accuracy of the statment
                     really is knowable, then a softening
                     of it is an error.

                       "The Nazis were sort of
                        bad in some ways."



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