"sort of" is elitist?

[Laurence Horn]

At 1:50 PM -0700 10/5/04, Arnold M. Zwicky wrote:
>On Oct 5, 2004, at 11:21 AM, Douglas Bigham wrote:
>
>>Sorry for coming in late, but maybe we're missing the point.  Reading
>>the
>>original post, I thought "Yeah, *sort of* is more pretentious than
>>*kinda*, I
>>guess".  I didn't think it had anything to do with the Women's
>>Language stuff, or
>>bothersome adverbials.  Just that good ol' boys say "kinda" not "sort
>>of".
>>But that was just a gut-reaction.
>
>someone should check this out.  gut reactions like this are notoriously
>unreliable.  people's beliefs about who uses particular forms are often
>way off-base.  (that is, of course, an interesting topic of study in
>its own right.)
>
Note too that "sort of" vs. "kinda" is not an entirely fair
comparison, any more than "sorta" vs. "kind of" would be...

Larry