Talk:to be honest

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I have inserted this phrase here out of sequence because many of the same arguments apply as with tell the truth. DCDuring TALK 18:23, 6 July 2009 (UTC)

Weak keep, be honest and to be honest aren't interchangeable. Be honest is an imperative and to be honest is used to give emphasis. Mglovesfun (talk) 10:08, 7 July 2009 (UTC)

In this case, "be honest" is not used in the same bracketed way as to be honest. "To be honest" just seems to be a standard phrasal construction to me. As a native speaker, I am less naturally sensitive to what is or is not idiomatic in the case of some common collocations. DCDuring TALK 15:41, 7 July 2009 (UTC)

Keep, sentence adverb is a speech act. DAVilla 06:00, 15 July 2009 (UTC)

In all fairness, I like the speech-act argument. But, in all honesty, even if sentence adverbs are truly speech acts, many do not seem worth inclusion. Not to put too fine a point on it, it seems possible to construct an enormous variety of sentence adverbs (or structures of similar force as speech acts) in the form of prepositional phrases as well as infinitives and gerunds. Digging more deeply, I wonder whether it is not true that any English collocation could not be put into a context where it is a speech act. To be brutally honest, sentence adverbs seem like the least meritorious of the speech acts for inclusion, if, indeed, they are best consdiered as speech acts. Quite possibly, there needs to be a line drawn. To add another related point, we are quickly demonstrating that WT:CFI and WT:IDIOM may need a bit more work, at least in this regard. DCDuring TALK 18:03, 16 July 2009 (UTC)

to be frank seems okay to me too, and to be (perfectly/totally) honest is just to be honest + adverb, so that is sum of parts. I still think we should keep these. Might as well close this with a keep (more than 30 days without a vote) but I'll close it tomorrow morning as the consensus is a weak one. Mglovesfun (talk) 10:03, 20 August 2009 (UTC)

Kept. Mglovesfun (talk) 23:07, 10 October 2009 (UTC)