My latest pet writing peeve: the use of “a kind of” and “a sort of.” I don’t know when I began noticing this writing tic, in myself and in the larger culture, and I don’t know how long it has been around. I’m certain I’ve seen these phrases in writing from as long as a century ago, but it’s all over the place now. I associate it with a sort of—oops, I did it again!—literary affectation that one sees not only on social media but in legacy media as well. Along the lines of Lionel Trilling saying, “Goethe says somewhere…,” but in a tweet, a post, or a piece. It evokes a Jamesian spirit of the ineffable, the not quite, the almost, that liminal space between the is and the is not. It’s meant to suggest a fineness of distinction, I suppose, the subtlety of one’s antenna. But it seems like little more than a cover for an insufficiency of one’s distinctions, a failure of thought, an inability to state as fully as possible what one is thinking or trying to think. I can’t stand it. I’m going to try to stop. Kinda, sorta.