In an interview aired on the BBC World Service (June 24, 2009), the English wife of the pastor of a church in Belfast, Northern Ireland, was heard to utter the fatuously silly phrase “at the end of the day” no fewer than four times in the span of under forty seconds. She could easily have substituted synonymous phrases like “in the end,” “in the final analysis,” or “ultimately” and avoided needless repetition.

Aside from its presumed formulaic usefulness, there must be some reason why speakers cling so tenaciously to “at the end of the day” despite its rebarbativeness. (It has even been lampooned in cartoons.) If one resorts to the tried-and-true explanation that sound often trumps sense in such formulas of English, then there are two features that call for attention. First, there is the anapestic prosody of the bipartite structure: “at the énd” plus “of the dáy.” Second, there is the quasi-paronomastic recurrence of the lax obstruent [d] in the words (end, day) that bear the main stress. For all that, one can only wish that it would go away like all doggerel.

MICHAEL SHAPIRO