In a movie Angels and Demons, the following conversation occurs.
Historian- Why me?
Police- Your expertise. Your erudition. Your recent involvement with certain church, shall we say, mysteries!
What does "shall we say" mean here? The tone seems to be of asking something, however it isn't. So what does it mean here?
Best Answer
Have you ever noticed when someone is speaking, and the speaker comes to a particular word or phrase, and then pauses to wink at the person they are talking with? Sometimes that wink might mean, "I'm just joking here," but sometimes it means a little bit more than that. Sometimes, the wink suggests:
That is the essence of the inserted shall we say.
I'm reminded of a skit my daughter and her friends wrote and performed for their school history class. Their topic was the role of women in the U.S. Civil War, and they wanted to portray what one blogger describes as:
In the skit, my daughter pulled a note from her bosom, shared the information, and then, before departing, said to her co-conspirator:
Sometimes we might use the term quote-unquote to convey the same sentiment, or use "finger quotes" to do that with a visual cue:
Another way she might have said that is:
No matter how it's spoken, or what visual cues are used, the sentiment is the same:
Back to Angels and Demons (which is a sequel to The Da Vinci Code), where the speaker says:
Here, the person being spoken to (Langdon) has indeed learned a lot about church's... What shall we call them? Mysteries? One word seems hardly adequate; it's a very tangled web. At any rate, the speaker and listener both know about all the secrets and conspiracies that were uncovered during Landon's previous adventures. By inserting the phrase shall we say before the word mysteries, it's as if the police inspector is saying: