Raise your hand if – like us – you can’t stand the phrase “to your point.” 🙋
No, can’t stand is too mild. We despise it. Those three simple words grate like fingernails on a chalkboard. To. Your. Point. Screeeeech!
We hear it all the time from talking heads on TV, and now increasingly on our own Zoom calls.
Have you ever noticed that when someone uses this phrase it’s more about their point (not that they have one), and less about yours?
“To your point, James, and if possible, I have an even less interesting one to make” someone might as well say.
It is so off-putting that all we hear after “to your point” is blah, blah, blah.
It’s like that Gary Larson cartoon.
Worse, the phrase seems to be even more addictive than other “gateway” cliches like “on the same page/same sheet of music,” “circle back,” and “at the end of the day,” which open the door for the much worse “to your point.” The moment one person says it, others feel the need to follow suit as if this were an online poker game. “I see your ‘to your point’ and I raise you one of my own” is what basically happens. We feel like the phrase should come with a warning… “may be habit forming.”
Here’s an idea: how about everyone just get to the point?
Meetings are already too long. Phrases like that make them longer.
Except if you were at a knife convention. Then “to your point” makes perfect sense. Or a gun show where one might say, as a pun, “to your hollow point.” Haha. Which is what that phrase is.
Hollow.
Ironically, it makes no point at all except to demonstrate that the speaker doesn’t have one of his or her own.
At the end of the day, whatever your opinion on this phrase, no need to circle back, let’s all get on the same page/same sheet of music right now about the best point of all.
A period.