Krugman writes: “Donald Trump is, of course, one of those bosses.” Decades ago I worked as a copy editor, the kind of work that attunes you to infinitesimal trivia, like where someone puts “of course” in a sentence. It’s a slippery, subtle business: it oscillates between serving as a sort of italics and a sort of boldface. In Krugman’s use, it emphasizes is, the implied alternative being that Trump isn’t — which might tell you something about what Krugman thinks his readers think. Or maybe who he hopes to persuade. Or, just maybe, that he’s sort of given up trying to persuade anyone. But more and more what my very American ear hears is a Bourdieuan distinction (should be Bourdieuvian, imo). On that level, there are two kinds of people: boldfacey people who put “of course” at the beginning or end of a sentence, and italicky people – and this is the distinction — who put it in the middle. When you say “Of course Trump is X,” it has a coercive force: we all know Trump is X. (A comma can make all the difference here, though.) But when you say “Trump is X, of course,” it’s more passive and querulous, as if, sadly, we were resigned to some inevitability — for example, that “all politicians are X.” But both confirm what we all know, in ways that propose a bond between the ~writer and reader. Nothing is being revealed, we’re just stating or acknowledging a fact. And that’s where this distinction kicks in, and why this kind of micro-bullsh*t actually matters. Putting “of course” in the middle of a sentence pauses it mid-thought. It signals a kind of reflexive awareness that makes an utterance rhetorical — as if Krugman were in his study, listening to his own voice. He isn’t just saying X, he’s saying that he’s saying X. It is, as they say these day, performative. His first bond is with himself, and the reader is a distant audience. It’s like he’s breaking the bad news to you. And when many people hear this kind of signal, they hear the echoes of power, like the boss closing the office door and saying, “Make yourself comfortable…” — IOW you’re about to be laid off. But my point isn’t prescriptive, that anyone should say things in a particular way. (Talk about performative, bleh…) My point is descriptive: we need to learn to hear these kinds of signals — because distinctions like this can function as a kind of micro-aggression. Krugman’s comfy: Princeton then CUNY faculty, Nobel Prize, NYT columnist. He can afford to say whatever he wants however he wants whenever he wants to who(m)ever he wants. But most people can’t do that. More (or less) than that, they’ve learned — i.e. they’ve been taught — that there’s no point in hearing it because they can’t do anything about it, so why f*cking bother? Of course this kind of minutiae isn’t the cause of the rage that endlessly reinforces economic, political, and social divides. But it’s the kind of signal that reinforces that rage. It reminds people that, unlike them, the speaker / writer / whatever has a room of their own: a study to write in, an office to close the door on, a bubble of privilege that allows them to select which things they want to emphasize and how. For most people pretty much everything is of course.