Supposition position – Frank McNally on ‘I suppose’

Among a shoal of emails in response to my ruminations about people saying “So” at the start of sentences, two arrived – within minutes of each other – concerning another well-worn opening gambit: “I suppose…”

The funny thing is, apart from their near simultaneity, they were making opposite points.The first emailer wrote that “So...” had “almost totally usurped ‘I suppose…’, which he suggested had been the previous go-to for interviewees: “A foolish one, I always thought, in that it actually undercuts the statement one is making…”

The second emailer, by contrast, thought the usage was still rife, and at least as worthy of comment as the “So…” phenomenon. After all, as well as serving some of the same purposes as that, he suggested, “I suppose” added an element of qualification to anything subsequently said, providing “an escape route in the event that the opinion expressed is challenged”.

Maybe that is one of its attractions, all right, although where I have noticed the “I suppose” gambit most is in sports interviews, especially with GAA managers (where it is also often prefixed with “Lookit”). And to my ears, it seems to strike a stoic, philosophical note more than anything else.

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The speaker seems to be saying that truth is unknowable, that we cannot be certain of anything in this universe, including the answer we’re about to hear on the starting line-up for Sunday’s game. It strikes a note of humility, at least, unlike the relentlessly smug “So”, which appears to know everything, including the interviewer’s next stupid question even before it’s asked.

As to whether the usage is waning or waxing, I’m not sure. But the question got me thinking again about another construction involving the same verb, this time in the past tense – eg “I’m supposed”, “We’re supposed”, etc – about which Myles na gCopaleen once wrote a famous column.

That one wasn’t always a sentence opener, although it could be.

It could equally appear somewhere in the middle of a sentence, or of a whole speech. But it was always the keynote. And as Myles pointed, it always drew the listener into a conspiracy:

“The words occur most frequently in connexion with breaches of the law or in circumstances where the gravest catastrophes are imminent. You enter a vast petrol depot. The place is full of refineries, pumps, tanks, a choking vapour fills the air. The man on the spot shows you the wonders and in due course produces his cigarettes and offers you one. ‘Of course I needn’t tell you,’ he comments as he lights up, ‘there’s supposed to be no smoking here.’

“You enter a tavern, meet a friend, invite him to join you for a drink. He accepts. He toasts your health, takes a long sip, and replaces the glass on the counter. He then taps his chest in the region of the heart. ‘As you know,’ he remarks, ‘I’m not supposed to touch this stuff at all.’

“You have been to some very late and boring function. You are going home, you feel the need for a drink, you are a gentleman and know nothing whatever about the licensing laws. Naturally you rap at the door of the first pub you see. All is in darkness. The door opens, a head appears, it peeps up the street and then down; next thing you are whisked in. ‘We’re supposed to be closed, you know’.”

And so it went. Myles quoted many other examples of what called “our domestic password in the endemic conspiracy of petty lawlessness”. But that was the early 1940s.

Has the “supposed” habit died out since?

Certainly, in this era of health and safety, we would not light a cigarette in an oil refinery, and would be considered only marginally less insane to do so in a pub. Indeed, as I've noted here before, one of the more remarkable achievements of modern Ireland was the complete and instant success of the smoking ban.

It was all the more surprising given the continued ambivalence, then and now, towards pub licensing laws.

Overnight we had a situation wherein drinkers began to interrupt their after-hours sessions, enjoyed in defiance of the old laws, to go outside for a smoke, in strict accordance with the new one.

I’m sure that was still happening in places before Covid closed the pubs.

And I would also not be surprised if, as recently as Christmas, people were not rapping on the doors of shebeens around Ireland and being whisked inside with the words, half-admonishing: “There’s supposed to be a pandemic on, you know.”