At a Melitz seminar this afternoon, I was amazed at the frequency at which the word “basically” was coming out of his mouth. Maybe 2.9 times per sentence? It’s really crazy how much all economists use that term all the time. Are they really “basicalizing” every thought that goes through their mind? Why don’t they use “on the whole”, “essentially”, “fundamentally” or “mainly” instead? Maybe it’s becuz economics is the science of models that simplify, or “basicalize”, complicated phenomena.
But it doesn’t seem like the practice is only an economist’ problem. It is among Wikipedia’s words to avoid, and there is even a National Committee to Stamp-out the Word “Basically.”, whose Chairman wrote that the word “has turned into one of the most predominant, albeit useless, words of the last decade. Emulating a fast-spreading cancer, it has infiltrated the speech of the majority of the English-speaking world. In an attempt to sound erudite, and “groping toward imagined elegance” everyone from produce clerks to our leaders in Congress misuses and abuses the word.” There is also a facebook group devoted to deleting the word from the dictionary. But according to Google trends, its usage has not increased that much in the last 5 years. Personally, I have decided to replace it with “to put it bluntly”…
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I have the same sense of agony when I hear that word...I originally thought it happened to be pronounced mostly by non-native english speakers. In italian, for example, people often say the equivalent of "practically" and I think they tend to replace with "basically".
I suggest to add the following official ban on our blog:
"This blog is "basically" free"
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