With the global rise of literacy and the spread of mass communication in the modern period has come the well-known phenomenon of what might be called the “bookification” of spoken language. What is meant by this is the migration of bookish expressions from the written domicile they previously inhabited exclusively into the sphere of spoken language.

In American English a relatively recent example of this phenomenon is the penetration into public speech of the written-language expressions “that (being) said” and “having said that” as sentence-introductory clauses. Instead of sticking with the tried-and-true, stylistically neutral “nevertheless,” “all the same,” and “at the same time” to qualify what they had just said, persons who speak publicly (but not only) frequently resort to these rebarbative expressions involving the past passive participle “said” in what can be evaluated as an unconscious (?) bid to sound more authoritative or well-informed. This is yet another instance of the widespread and powerful influence of media language on changes in the stylistic norms defining the boundaries between written and oral speech. The cumulative result of such changes is a general growth in the pretentiousness and fatuousness of spoken discourse––evaluated, moreover, as being stylistically neutral––where plain-spokenness would have been normative heretofore. Ultimately, such changes can only serve to undermine the truth-seeking impulse of the human animal in its linguistic aspect.