By these analyses, objections to such language are merely squeamish.
A senior administration official said the move away from confrontational language was merely a tactical retreat.
Behind the scenes, U.S. diplomats scrambled to explain to their counterparts that the language was merely bureaucratic, but the handling of the sanctions was an American misstep, and there appears to be a gathering nervousness that the Venezuelan mess could sour the summit.
Bloomfieldians, he said, who had imagined themselves to be bringing scientific rigor to what had previously been a subject for the humanities, were not scientific at all: the point of science was to explain the world, and Bloomfieldians, by confining themselves to the surface ephemera of language, were merely describing it.
The constitution lists Irish as "the national language" and "first official language"; English is merely "a second official language".
Hare sometimes snatches a resonant phrase from the midst of this, but the language is often merely feverish: it's hard for any actor to proclaim to her lover 'I want it now' with a straight face.
First, Chomsky argued, mastery of a language is not merely a matter of having one's verbal behaviors 'controlled' by various elements of the environment, including others' utterances.
For Lakoff and Johnson, this non-literal language is not merely peripheral expression useful for adding bells and whistles to the bustle of communication, but reflects something deep about how love is conceptualized.
But a linguist precipitated on this parade by noting that -- given the uncertainties about why Homo sapiens even has language (is it merely a talent conferred by a random genetic mutation that hit our species 150,000 years ago?), there's no guarantee that the extraterrestrials will be blessed with the gift of gab.
