Minimizing Words

We went to a group meeting tonight where people were arguing.  I had no opinion about which course of action to take. I was therefore swayed, as I often am, by which side was fighting fair. I noticed - not for the first time - that the use of certain words are often keys that a person is being deceptive, mostly usually because they are deceiving themselves. When someone says "All I want" in an angry tone, it is abundantly clear that they want more, much more, than what they are saying in the following sentence. They are smuggling in larger requests while painting themselves as asking for so little that you are completely unreasonable for not granting their humble plea. 

I allow that there are times when the speaker means only what is said and no more. "All I want is a donut." "I just want to get home before dinner." These more innocent uses are more likely in conversation among a few, with no thought of announcement to the world.  The larger the imagined audience, the more we are in the presence of calculated speech.

Lewis covers it in the Screwtape Letters.  

Your patient must demand that all his own utterances are to be taken at their face value and judged simply on the actual words, while at the same time judging all his mother's utterances with the fullest and most oversensitive interpretation of the tone and the context and the suspected intention. She must be encouraged to do the same to him. Hence from every quarrel they can both go away convinced, or very nearly convinced, that they are quite innocent. You know the kind of thing: "I simply ask her what time dinner will be and she flies into a temper,"(Italics mine)

and

 "Oh please, please...all I want is a cup of tea, weak but not too weak, and the teeniest weeniest bit of really crisp toast". You see? Because what she wants is smaller and less costly than what has been set before her, she never recognises as gluttony her determination to get what she wants, however troublesome it may be to others.

"I'm only saying..." (no you are saying a good deal more than you are pretending, Jasper)

"I just think..." (no, you are thinking a good deal else but you don't want to be called on it.)

People seldom use "merely" in speech, but I think in written discourse it has the same self-refuting nature. I think "My sole purpose" is more borderline, possibly legitimate but instantly suspicious.  "It's just that..." is similarly borderline, and I think that has to do with being more commonly placed in the middle of a sentence. It's sentences that start with strongly declarative minimizing words that are the problem. 

It is interesting that something this subtle conceptually is nonetheless learned by most speakers of English, both its legitimate and its deceptive uses. I don't think people notice it consciously when it comes out of their mouths. They recognise it in opponents, though. Be careful when you hear such words coming out of your own mouth.