Kipp is sick today with a fever, so no pre-school this morning. I’ll be plying him with liquids and homemade chicken soup—a very fast version of chicken soup that I make for myself whenever I have a head cold, not so much because the soup helps, but because the act of chopping the celery, onions and ginger while inhaling deeply always makes me a great deal better. Kipp can’t chop, and he doesn’t have a cold, but I always feel so helpless when he’s ill.
Having said that, what? Having said that, I don’t feel so helpless about this:
Everyone is saying “having said that. . .”these days. I noticed that this phrase was on a list of Words and phrases “banished from the Queen’s English for mis-, mal-, or over-use as well as general uselessness” The list went on to say.
HAVING SAID THAT and THAT SAID -- Nominated by many for over-use, especially in the news media, according to Kay J. Jauch, Edmonton, Alberta, and William Hamlin of Wappingers Falls, New York.
“I heard you the first time,” said David Patrick of Lafayette, Indiana.
“Annoying useless filler,” said Sadie Campbell of Scarborough, Ontario.
“It seems like the intellectual form of ‘ya know.’” Shelley Gaskin, Scottsdale, Arizona.
I like the phrase—it gives one a little more time than ‘but’ to summon thoughts—or rather, I should say I liked it, until I started hearing it too much. Therefore, I decided, that if I’m going to use it, and I promise to use it sparingly, I’m going to damn well know what I’m talking about.
Despite what David, Sadie and Shelly say above, “having said that” has little to do with repetition, filling dead air, or being an intellectual form of “ya know”. (In fact, the intellectual form of “ya know?” would be “do you know?” . I know because I once had an English professor, Dr. Claudia Johnson, a renowned Jane Austen scholar, who peppered just about every sentence with a dash of “Do you know?” at the end—as in, ‘I’d like to eat that last piece of pizza, do you know? But as a woman I feel I can’t, do you know?’ )
Back to the topic.
“Having said that” is a phrase that means “despite what I have just said”. “That being said” means “despite what has just been said.”
“Having said that” should be followed by the pronoun ‘I’ to be logical, because “having said” is in the active voice and needs a subject. Yet it is often not followed by an ‘I’. Let me quote from a University of California at Berkeley press release which I got from the Internet:
“There is no gene that forces a person to be straight or gay,” said Breedlove, who studies the biology of sexual orientation. “I believe there are many social and psychological, as well as biological, factors that make up sexual preference.
“Having said that, these data do suggest that there are some people in the world who are gay because of fetal androgen levels.”
In that quotation, it would have been better if “Having said that” were to be followed by “I think these data ?” or substituted with the passive “That being said” which does not require one to name who has said “that”.
And so, having said all this, I must run.
10:09:55 AM 
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