As a reader of this column you probably dislike people on the wireless saying ‘well’, especially Mr Robin Cook. But according to a learned paper by Jan Svartvik, it occurs every 150 words or so in an average conversation.
With conversation as its habitat, it naturally occurs frequently on programmes such as Today on Radio 4. I did see it the other day in a headline in the Daily Telegraph: ‘Champagne (well, English sparkling) for the men about to wreck Brussels’ — a reference to the UK Independence Party.
In the Telegraph sense, well is what Dr Svartvik calls ‘an editing marker for self-correction’. It functions in a similar way to that is (for ‘reference editing’), rather (for ‘nuance editing’) and I mean for ‘mistake editing’. The special function of well as a self-correcting marker is ‘claim editing’, as in ‘I drove at 90 miles an hour — well 85 — all the way to Taunton’.
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