@snailplane If you wanted it to be surely contemptuous how would you say that you didn't know the person who called?
Anonymous
@Færd Umm, I think you'd want to rephrase it then. Surely you can already think of a number of ways to express contempt toward a person, and I don't have to list them for you? :-)
Yes! I just wanted to know if you would rephrase it for sure.
Anonymous
There was a good chapter about vagueness sometimes expressing contempt by Satoko Suzuki, Pejorative Connotation: A Case of Japanese in Discourse Markers: Description and Theory (1998). Although it's primarily about Japanese, she mentions (for example) the English expression the likes of X as an expression which has "lack of specification" and has "pejorative connotation in certain contexts".
@Færd it was all under one quote which I assumed was from somewhere else.
But yes, I thought it was a single quote.
"Tony Morrison, whoever he is" "Tony Morrison, whoever he may be" both are contemptuous (dismissing them because unknown to speaker and if unknown must not be that important).
which is funny because she's an important modern author