What, Dear Gentle Reader(s), does a tendency to preface responses with "No, but" do to a conversation?
Doesn't it raise one's hackles (whatever they are)? After making a clear, succinct, and virtually unassailable point, what is a person to do if a respondent's first word is "No"?
Shut down? Curl up like an armadillo, and present a shield to the world? Hide one's head in the sand? Turn, like a porcupine, and unleash dozens of stinging quills upon the miscreant?
Rather than engaging in cowardice or mayhem, perhaps it is possible to convince the perpetrators of this negativity that too many noes is bad for conversation, and bad for the no, too. Spread anything too thin and it loses its value.
Let us begin a campaign, then, DGR(s), to retire the ubiquitous No and to proselytize for the use of "Yes, and, too..." or "May I offer a slightly different view?"
That way your conversing partner is at once applauded for perspicacity and invited to participate in a new intellectual adventure.
Yes.
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