meaning - What does "if you will" mean?


A TV program says,



they started this accounting gimmick, if you will, and they...



What does "if you will" mean? Is it a short form of "if you will [a certain verb]"?



Answer



No, it is not a short form of anything. Here, will is not an auxiliary verb, but a full verb. Nothing is omitted in the sentence. Will, here, is used in the meaning "want" or "wish", which is considered archaic in most other contexts, outside of set phrases. It is related to the German wollen, Dutch willen, etc., all with the same meaning "to want, desire".



will


 1. (obsolete) To wish, desire. [9th-19th c.]


if you will


 2. So to speak



Here is a related Language Log post that makes a rather interesting point of "if you will" being semantically strikingly similar to the ubiquitous Valley-Girl like.



Like functions in younger speakers' English as something perfectly ordinary: a way to signal hedging about vocabulary choice — a momentary uncertainty about whether the adjacent expression is exactly the right form of words or not. If the English language didn't implode when if you will took on this kind of role among the baby boomers, it will survive having like take on an extremely similar role for their kids.



Emphasis mine.


Edit: here's yet another Language Log post that actually discusses a comic strip that unfairly criticises "if you will" precisely because the cartoonist mistakes will for an auxilliary verb.


If you will


Language Log goes on to comment,



In his latest intrusion, it's refreshing to see Lemont [Brown, the protagonist] identify himself as a member of the Idiom Police, since his too-literal reading of "if you will" has nothing to do with grammar. [...] What "if you will" does not do, of course, is require the interlocutor to "accept the words you just chose to say," as Lemont claims. I suspect Lemont's the type of non-Gricean guy who responds to the discursive filler "you know" with "No, I don't know."



It then elaborates on that, linking to the aforementioned like post and quoting the definition from UsingEnglish as well as the one from OED:



Oxford English Dictionary says ["if you will"] is "sometimes used parenthetically to qualify a word or phrase: = ‘if you wish it to be so called’, ‘if you choose or prefer to call it so.’" Citations are given for the exact phrase back to the 16th century, with similar elliptical uses dating back to Old English.



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