So I Heard
Preliterate (and illiterate?) people make a distinction, when speaking, between something they know firsthand—because they were there—and something they know only by hearsay. (”Hear Say.”) It’s a distinction so crucial to navigating the world safely that it is built into the grammar of many languages. There is a different verb form for “I know” depending on HOW you know. Technically, in linguistics this is called “grammaticalized evidentiality.”1
[A] language which systematically (e.g. grammatically) marks evidential categories might serve as a pacesetter for early reasoning about sources of information. We conducted experimental studies with children learning Korean (a language with evidential morphology) and English (a language without grammaticalized evidentiality).
~ Papafragou et al., “Evidentiality in Language and Cognition,” 2006
In English, just as we make up for the lack of a second-person plural with “y’all” and “youse” and “you guys,” we make up for the lack of grammaticalized evidentiality with “So I heard” (a phrase I heard deployed often in a tone of wised-up skepticism by a minor gangster who painstakingly wrote down an order for a “BOLGANA” sandwich).
Mass media dangerously effaced this distinction—we claimed to “know” what we had only seen on TV—long before the internet and AI brought us a postliterate, post-truth culture.
We now desperately need to revive that ancient survival tool, the skeptical awareness of “evidentiality.” All you can REALLY know is what you experienced or witnessed directly—”unmediated.”
And sometimes not even that. (Hallucinations, e.g.) The senses are the first media, and they too can lie.
Back when I was a practicing journalist I ran into this problem. Journos were simultaneously held to competing standards of accuracy. On one hand, we were only supposed to report as fact anything *we ourselves* or our orgs reported; anything else was “reportedly.”
EXCEPT if some mysterious threshold of orgs were all reporting the same thing. At which point we could report that as fact even if we and our own org hadn’t reported it ourselves.
That loophole never sat well with me, and is part of the mechanism of media group-think to which you refer.
Love this one ! I try to write from my personal experience for the most part.