“mere” was the scare-quoted usage in the original post. I wanted to emphasize that even weakening it with scare quotes wasn’t enough.
Delta seems to have edited it from from “merely” to “simply”. Not sure why, since they all mean exactly the same thing: roughly “I am using this sentence to claim something unsupported by its literal meaning”.
(Rather than “lullaby words”, I personally like to think of them as “alarm words”.)
“mere” was the scare-quoted usage in the original post. I wanted to emphasize that even weakening it with scare quotes wasn’t enough.
Delta seems to have edited it from from “merely” to “simply”. Not sure why, since they all mean exactly the same thing: roughly “I am using this sentence to claim something unsupported by its literal meaning”.
(Rather than “lullaby words”, I personally like to think of them as “alarm words”.)