My immediate reaction to the question ‘Does that make sense?’ is to doubt the reliability of what the person has just told me. Do they feel like they’ve not explained themselves properly? Is there something missing? Does it actually not make sense? Are they bullshitting me? And what happens if I say, ‘No, it doesn’t make sense, and neither do you, fuck nuts’?
Most of the time I suspect they think it makes them sound like a good communicator because they’re inviting comments. Please don’t. Just make sense in the first place and leave it at that. If I have any questions, I’ll ask them. It’s also really fucking patronising and serial users of the phrase are always slightly creepy, like an old colleague of mine, the Disney Prince, who used the ambulant toilets at work as a proxy brothel for daytime dating-app hookups. He’d say, ‘Does that make sense?’ after every second sentence, and every time he said it, he cocked his head to the side and smiled quizzically like your sketchy uncle in a Smarties advert (this combination of wrongness still haunts me to this day).
The world is awash with annoying expressions people use to make themselves sound better than they actually are. For example, saying, ‘It’s like comparing apples with apples’, when you can’t be fucked thinking about the situation, or ‘I’m just being honest’, when you’ve just been a gormless shit weasel, or saying ‘you’re entitled to your opinion’ when you’re clearly not because you’re a manipulative narcissist. The list goes on.
Now, I’m not passing judgment on people for their linguistic indiscretions. If you’re a self-made person, who has created something that has made the world a better place, then you can pass judgement on people, but until then the best course of action is to shut the fuck up and enjoy the free lunch. However, if you ever meet me and say, ‘Does that make sense?’, I will frame you for a crime you didn’t commit, smash up your bicycle with a sledgehammer, and then, ‘at the end of the day’, tell you I was ‘just being honest’.
And BTW it’s not ‘You do the math(s)’, it’s ‘You do the arithmetic’. Let that one sink in…
