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At the chalkface: Cruel to be kind?

Teaching staff
Yes, I sometimes wish I could have done the hard stuff better with my sometimes impossible 8th years – like, say, that Tom Hardy in Peaky Blinders or Roy Keane in just about anything. A little fear goes a long way. But we’re surely better than this?

I read the sentence again. Rubbish, isn’t it? With its dog whistle subtext of “I’m well ‘ard, me!” An unhappy mix of the nasty and the incoherent. 

But the Good Doctor is a formidable intellect. So let’s respect his rhetoric and give it a good going over.

The opening, subordinate clause, in the mode conditional, creates a note of humble uncertainty and hard won chalkface wisdom. A saloon bar cliché, it softens us up for the walloping certitudes of its main clause, where two semantically treacherous abstractions are clumsily tethered by an ugly phrasal verb, which “gets in the way of” all clarity. Does it mean “stops”, “blocks” or “prevents”? Who knows? Onwards.

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