In Being Wrong, Kathryn Shulz addresses the commonly held myth that we should purge our language of hedge words:

These kinds of disarming, self-deprecating comments, (“this could be wrong, but…” “maybe I’m off the mark here…”) are generally considered more typical of the speech patterns of women than men. Not coincidentally, they are often criticized as overly timid and self-sabotaging. But I’m not sure that’s the whole story. Awareness of one’s own qualms, attention to contradiction, acceptance of the possibility of error: these strike me as signs of sophisticated thinking, far preferable in many contexts to the confident bulldozer of unmodified assertions. Philip Tetlock, too, defends these and similar speech patterns (or, rather, the mental habits they reflect), describing them, admiringly, as “self-subversive thinking.” That is, they let us function as our own intellectual sparring partner, thereby honing—or puncturing—our beliefs. They also help us do greater justice to complex topics and make it possible to have riskier thoughts. At the same time, by moving away from decree and toward inquiry, they set the stage for more open and interesting conversations.

Schulz, Being Wrong, page 309

I want to reinforce that phrasing—moving away from decree and toward inquiry. It reminds me of Chris Xu’s classic and brilliant post about blowhard syndrome—that is, the tendency for our culture to reward hubris and perfectionism and to pathologize humility and self-awareness. By contrast, the move toward inquiry values the opportunity to learn over the desire to validate one’s existing—and necessarily incomplete—knowledge. That is, inquiry is a dynamic, active movement, unlike the stuckness and stagnancy that a decree evokes. Inquiry is an open door; decree, a closed one.

Moreover, I don’t think it’s an accident that we associate those hedge words with femininity. Oppression always demands absolutes: unable to stand up to inquiry, it marks inquiry as proscribed. But like a king living in a glass house declaring a ban on bricks, the decree is itself impossible to maintain. Sooner or later, everyone picks up a stone.