Right?

Let me start this by saying I'm not aware that anyone who reads this blog is guilty of doing the thing I'm about to talk about, so I'm not trying to call you out.

Imagine a person giving the following explanation to you. Imagine that this is just a normal person, not good, not bad, not pretty, not ugly. And don't pay attention to the inane content. "Well, I mean, the story is clearly about the resolution of the Oedipal crisis, right? Cortazar obviously intended that as a surface reading." What you may have skipped over but has gone past irritating and onto hilarious for me, is the little word, "right."

"Right?" is not a useful thing to say. Not when you're explaining something, not when you're describing something, not saying anything at all. It does not add anything to an explanation, and it is usually just an attempt on behalf of the speaker to cover all their bases so they don't look stupid in the event they're wrong, or more likely, it's an attempt to make them look smarter and make you look stupid in the midst of a discussion. When a person says "Right?" in this way, the implication is either 1) that what the person is saying is incredibly obvious and will not be disputed, in which case it's a superfluous rhetorical device that still sounds patronizing, or 2) that what the person is saying is not at all obvious, but they're trying to make it sound like it is so that if you disagree, you look like an idiot, because their tone already made it clear that what they were saying is obvious.

Everyone around here does this, and I once caught myself doing it and was horrified and apologized to the person immediately. I have probably done this more often than I'm aware of, since it's in the air here, and to those who have spoken to me recently, my sincerest apologies. But I will try my best to avoid it, no matter how many professors and students do it. The only time I will do it (the only time anyone should do it) is if I feel like I'm going crazy. If, for example, I suspect that there might be a man floating outside my fourth-floor window, I might turn to the person next to me and say, "That's not a man floating outside my window, right?" In that case, I would be asking a genuine question which required an assuring answer. Or it might even be okay if I needed assurance in other areas of my life (e.g. "I don't smell bad, right?"). But that is certainly the exception, not the rule.

Obviously, it's a play for confidence that hardly anyone in graduate school actually has, but the lack of self-awareness here is slightly disturbing.