the.com/qualification
The asterisk you add to a bold claim so it survives contact with reality.
means A skill, credential, or condition that officially qualifies someone or something, or a limiting clause that narrows an otherwise too-sweeping statement.
from From Latin qualis, 'of what kind,' plus facere, 'to make' — so to qualify is literally 'to make of a certain kind,' to sort something into its proper category rather than let it float as an unqualified absolute. The word entered English through medieval Latin and French in legal and academic contexts, where defining exactly 'what kind' of claim, degree, or right you held mattered enormously. The sense of 'hedge' or 'limit' grew naturally from this: to qualify a statement is to specify what kind of truth it is — not the whole truth, but a particular, bounded one.
- legal cousin
- courts call it a hedge or a carve-out
- rhetoric trick
- weakens the claim, strengthens the credibility
- overuse tell
- too many and you said nothing at all
- root meaning
- from qualis, latin for of what kind